I nearly got fired from Dunnes Stores!
Many, many years ago, I worked for Dunnes Stores in Cornelscourt.
One particular day, I was asked to restock the frozen food section with frozen packets of vegetables. So I went into the back up freezer and committed the sackable offence by climbing over boxes of product on pallets to get to the required stock.
"Get Down you stupid B****X!" my boss shouted, " You're damaging all the effing stuff" He was right, there's me putting my size 13's into pizza boxes, beef burgers and petit pois.
Fast forward 25 years, I was asked come up with a design to maximise all the space within a large freezer for a Dunnes Stores in the Mid West. Having remembered the verbal guidance that I had received. This was the result!
If you are overloaded with frozen bread boxes, french fries, frozen beef, fish or even desserts and would like a simple solution, please call me on 087 2691014
Damaged packaging
Dunnes stores were experiencing a huge amount of wastage due to frozen food packaging being damaged. Deliveries of frozen product would arrive from their suppliers on pallets. These pallets would then be moved into the back up freezers, push up against the walls or left in the middle of the room. Most pallets contained split product. So when staff members would come into the freezer with a stock list to replenish stock on to the shop shop floor, they would have to pick stock from these split pallets, inevitably the stock they required was at the bottom of the pallet which require staff members to hand ball other boxed product on to the floor in order to get at the required stock.
This damage is primarily being caused by staff members mishandling the frozen product. In order to get at the product, staff members were man handling product whose packaging was exceptionally light resulting in the packaging been ripped, torn or the squashed. Naturally this damaged packaging is unabled to be sold to the general public resulting a financial loss.
Storage Design Brief
We were asked by the store manager to maximise all available space within his freezer room. He wanted a solution that stored a large volume of bulky product, he wanted all the boxed product to stored individually and securely. He recognised that there was a lot of under utilised space over the existing pallets that could be employed to store more product. he gave us permission to incorporate this space but to be mindful about manual handling heights.
Freezer Plastic Shelving Solution
As with a majority of our shelving solutions for walk in cold rooms and freezers, we would use the REA Plastic Shelving System to deliver the solution for this storage problems that Dunnes Stores were having at this store.
We decided to use the REA Plastic Shelving for the following reasons:
- It will suitable for working freezer environments of up to -40 degrees celcius.
- It has a weight load certification for weight up to 200Kgs per meter lenght which is ample for the project
- Our manufacturer will make to measure according to our agreed design.
As you can see from the lifestyle picture, we created a two shelf configuration which replicated the foot print of a euro pallet on the bottom and the same size as the second shelf. We created compartments like pigeon holes to store individual product. Theses compartments were designed around each product and the amount that needed to be stored. We worked this design around the room and I feel we delivered a very functional and well organised freezer