Scramble to save $500m in frozen food stranded by major transport group collapse

Suppliers are scrambling to retrieve $500 million value of frozen meals from refrigerated warehouses belonging to a lately collapsed logistics group.  

Many of the 1,500 employees employed by Scott’s Refrigerated Logistics have been made redundant with a skeleton employees remaining on the books. 

At a collectors assembly on Thursday, directors stated Scott’s reported a loss of $41 million within the present monetary yr. 

The freight firm appointed Korda Mentha as receiver after coming into voluntary administration final week. 

Korda Mentha has confirmed a race is underway to relocate greater than 110,000 pallets of frozen items value half a billion {dollars} from Scott’s chilly storage warehouses.

Nowhere else for frozen items to go

Refrigerated Warehouse and Transport Affiliation government officer Marianne Kintzel stated the velocity of Scott’s liquidation was a problem. 

“Taking 750 vehicles and 200,000 pallet areas out of the market in every week may be very exhausting to soak up,” she stated. 

“A extra deliberate rundown would have helped provide chain stability and diminished waste.”

Ms Kintzel stated there was not sufficient warehouse capability elsewhere to cowl the lack of Scott’s, which was one of many greatest transporters out there.

She stated different cold-chain firms have been pulling collectively, making “hundreds of telephone calls”, to fill the hole. 

However labour shortages, the price of gas, insurance coverage, tolls and power are impacting the entire cold-chain sector. 

Constructing and sustaining refrigerated warehouses is without doubt one of the greatest prices. 

“Margins are very tight as a result of extremely aggressive nature of the trade,” Ms Kintzel stated. 

Grocery store big Coles has efficiently eliminated all its inventory from the Scott’s community and didn’t use its warehouses nevertheless it’s a distinct story for its suppliers.

A Coles spokesperson stated it was working with suppliers who used Scott’s to assist them safe new supply choices. 

“We’re working exhausting to minimise disruption for patrons and our farmers and suppliers as deliveries ramp up,” the spokesperson stated.  

Transport Employees Union assistant nationwide secretary Nick McIntosh stated whereas potential shortages in supermarkets have been a short-term downside, they have been half of a bigger difficulty.

“We all know there’s a whole lot of inventory caught up in Scott’s warehouses as we communicate, that a few of these purchasers are struggling to get to and transport to different areas in time earlier than all of it goes off,” he stated. 

“It is clearly a long-term difficulty if the largest fridge firm within the nation is unable to have industrial contracts which are sustainable.”

Mr McIntosh stated it was an issue governments had ignored for many years and it was time to deal with the industrial pressures in transport contracts. 

‘Crew effort’ monitoring down containers

In the meantime, rail freight firm Pacific Nationwide is supporting earlier prospects of Scott’s to find inventory scattered round Australia. 

Pacific Nationwide CEO Paul Scurrah stated work was underway to trace down hundreds of refrigerated containers deposited by Scott’s inside Pacific Nationwide’s community of depots and terminals. 

Mr Scurrah stated it was an “monumental and complicated nationwide train”.

Working with freight forwarders like Linfox and Lindsay Transport, Mr Scurrah stated was “serving to to mitigate the worst parts of this unhappy and disruptive scenario”. 

The Transport Employees Union helps members who misplaced jobs at Scott’s discover work with different firms, together with Wodonga’s Ron Finemore Transport, International Categorical, Linfox, ACFS, Pacific Nationwide and FBT Transwest.