D&F McCarthy has completed its move to a new state of the art wholesale fruit and vegetable warehouse in Memorial Way, Norwich with a storage capacity in excess of 1000 pallets in a fully temperature controlled environment.
A family business founded in Drury Lane in 1877, D&F McCarthy have operated from the same Norwich site in Raynham Street since 1965.
Director Martin McCarthy said: “This has been the biggest single change in the trade. Before that everything was manual and most deliveries were short hops across the city. The Raynham Street premises had been designed with that in mind. Ten years later our customers had largely moved outside the City and we would have designed it differently. Consequently we had to go after the customers and as our competitors have all disappeared it was the right thing to do.
“Today, fresh produce is a distribution business. Our new premises have been constructed as a complete cold chain operation, everything is chilled.”
The facility has spacious loading docks, a chilled receiving area where quality checks are made before transit to cleaning, picking or pre-packing areas. The facility also has with special coldrooms for bananas, salads and dairy produce.
IMA Cooling Systems put together an energy efficient refrigeration plant that could be extended to match future developments within the Norwich site.
At the heart of the scheme is a central compressor pack which has two separate suction manifolds operating at different temperatures to serve the areas over 6-8ºC areas and 2-4ºC areas independently. All evaporators are served with electronic expansion valves which provide energy savings of up to 25 per cent and enhance evaporator performance.
A centralised leak detection and alarm system incorporates a 12 channel refrigerant monitor using infrared absorption technology to detect minute quantities of refrigerant in sampled air taken from various areas within the factory. There are two levels of alarm, the first of which triggers an external alert and a second which will shut down the plant and send a second alert level signal to an external alarm.
John Dye of IMA Cooling Systems said: “Refrigeration is one of the highest users of energy in any food factory or storage facility and the systems are designed for minimal environmental impact and early payback through reduced energy bills and lower general servicing costs.”
