Welch's, a leading producer of juices, jams and jellies, has signed a three-year contract with Weber Distribution to serve as its West Coast distribution center.
From the Welch's manufacturing plant in Lawton, Mich., more than 100 different flavors and sizes of juices and jellies are shipped via rail to Weber's La Mirada, Calif.-based facility. The 203,000-square-foot distribution center contains six on-site rail doors where roughly 260 inbound loads or nearly 450,000 cases of Welch's products are received each month. Some of the product is stored in a 75,000-square-foot section of the warehouse, while much of it is immediately processed and labeled for distribution to Welch's customers across 11 Western states.
The manufacturer hired Weber because of its expertise in handling grocery and solid distribution network, says Bruce True, Welch's manager of distribution planning. "We closed our plant on the West Coast, so we needed to find a third-party logistics company that could handle warehousing, order consolidation and delivery to our customers," says True. "Until Weber, we were shipping 95 percent of the product from our plant warehouses directly to our customers."
Weber processes, picks, labels and transports an average of 425 orders or more than 350,000 cases per month for Welch's.
Welch's is a grower-owned cooperative and functions as the processing and marketing subsidiary of the National Grape Cooperative. It sells more than 400 products throughout the United States and in more than 50 other countries and territories worldwide.
Los Angeles-based Weber Distribution provides contract warehousing and transportation logistics, including distribution, supply chain management, real estate development, personnel staffing, transportation management, material handling and order fulfillment.
Visit www.weberd.com.