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Ginsters, A refreshing chain

Manufacturing in Action, Source : The Manufacturer
Zone : Logistics and supply chain
Published : November 2007

Debbie Giggle discusses new approaches to supply chain management with Ginster’s ‘piemen’ Laurence Oldman and Ray Hanly

Over the last year, consumers have become increasingly aware of ‘food miles’ – the distance that food has to travel from source to store, and the carbon footprint that this entails. For food manufacturer Ginsters, however, sourcing fresh local ingredients has been a priority for many years, and has led to the introduction of some ground-breaking new approaches to supply chain management.

Ginsters traces its history back to the 1960s when Cornish farmer Geoffrey Ginster, who had an egg packing station in Callington, hit on the idea of starting a van sales service selling fresh pasties to local retailers. Since 1977, Ginsters has belonged to the Samworth Brothers Group – a leading UK food manufacturer made up of 13 operating companies split between Leicestershire and Cornwall, with a turnover in excess of £450 million and over 6,000 employees. Today the Ginsters Original Cornish Pasty has become the nation’s biggest selling chilled savouries product.

The range now encompasses slices, pies, sausage rolls, sandwiches and other snacks, as well as pasta salads, in addition to the traditional Cornish pasty. Manufacturing has continued throughout the company’s history in Callington, and Ginsters is proud of its Cornish heritage. Today, 500 people are employed at the site and products are delivered direct to motorway service stations, forecourts, convenience stores and other outlets by Ginsters’ own 150-strong fleet of vehicles.

Sourcing and management of fresh ingredients is at the heart of product quality.

Laurence Oldman, purchasing manager, explained: “Sourcing locally is a priority for us and over the last four to five years we’ve taken about 250,000 ‘food miles’ out of our supply chain per annum by increasing the amount of materials purchased from the area to around 40 per cent. Getting the right number of suppliers is important. On the one hand the supplier base for a specific ingredient needs to be large enough to safeguard the company in the event of a problem with production, for example, a ban on the movement of livestock in a specific region. On the other hand, the volumes you are purchasing from a farmer need to be of sufficient size to make it worthwhile for them to invest in their site and to devote land and resources to specific end products.”

Ginsters has taken an interesting approach in order to develop its supply base among the farming community.

“In October 2006, we formed the Ginsters Agricultural Academy,” Oldman explained. “The aim was to provide a forum for around 20 key farmers among our supply base to get together for a cross-fertilisation of ideas. We could see that the yields varied between the farms and thought that, by sharing best practice, they could each begin to supply us with a greater percentage of our overall requirement, instead of us bringing it in from further afield. We could take, for example, additional quantities of wheat from our local suppliers, if these crops were available and met our quality standards. Another issue is that there are insufficient crops, such as onions, which we would be very interested in sourcing locally, that aren’t traditionally grown in this area.

“Another aspect of the Ginsters Agricultural Academy, in collaboration with Duchy College, is to provide us all with access to the latest ideas and learning opportunities. The Academy meets a couple of times a year and, in between times, farmers are kept abreast of the latest information via a dedicated webpage.”

Ginsters has found that its farming background and track record of supporting the local agricultural community have enabled it to form highly successful relationships with farmers. This is important when dealing with highly-independent business people who have such a depth of expertise and are generally conservative about taking on new ideas.

“It’s not just a one-way process though,” commented Oldman. “By understanding the pressures on farmers, we can operate much more effectively as a manufacturing facility.”

Managing such a large volume of fresh produce with minimum waste is another major challenge. To give some idea of scale, the company bakes over three million pastries a week, typically requiring 70 tonnes of beef a week, with two deliveries of vegetables every day and another two of poultry.

“The typical time taken from arrival of raw materials at the factory to the dispatch of finished products will be around 24 hours,” he said. “Accurate forecasting is essential. The production plan will be prepared by lunchtime of the day before and deliveries scheduled accordingly. We have System 21 based programs to manage production, which generate the bills of materials and so on. There’s no substitute for experience but, to be honest, I don’t think you could manage this scale or complexity without sophisticated IT.”

Production director Ray Hanly said: “There has been investment in the region of £20 million in recent years to assist the company to grow its business within its existing footprint. We have installed two new pick and place robots, and we have been investing in adapting the skills base of the workforce. Our heritage is in baking, not in operating machinery, and that involves a cultural change as well as upskilling.

“We now have a team of dedicated trainers on site and have used successful implementations of kaizen in the pharmaceutical industry as our inspiration for continuous improvement here. Already we’ve seen significant improvements in tackling production bottlenecks. Techniques such as 5S, combined with the introduction of new technology, have also enabled us to improve consistency of quality across the whole of our 24 hour, seven day a week production cycle.”

The establishment on-site of an independent and externally accredited microbiological testing facility, Westward Laboratories, has also assisted the streamlining of production.

“Having the right people, and running a forward scheduling system that provides no surprises, is key to delivering the goods,” concluded Hanly.

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