Port-based warehousing and logistics companies that handle and store coffee and cocoa for onward transport to their customers – the major coffee roasters and leading chocolate manufacturers – must comply with rigorous standards laid down by the New York Board of Trade and the London International Finance & Futures Exchange (LIFFE). Not to do so can mean loss of accreditation as a designated import facility, and loss of business.<\/p>\n
Quality control is all-important, as are a range of added-value services that warehouses can offer clients.<\/p>\n
Major German warehouses say margins have been tight in the last 12-18 months but this has not stopped several of them investing in new facilities and, in some cases, relocating to completely new locations that can provide enhanced, value-added services to their customers.<\/p>\n
Coffee Terminal Hamburg (CTH) enlarged its silo capacity in 2003 and plans to build a number of additional silos in the near future, but they say warehouse and logistics companies at the major ports remain under pressure with too little margin, primarily because the number of importers – and the number of large roasters – has declined in recent years, although there are still plenty of warehouses.<\/p>\n
Kaffee-Largerei, a licensed master-sampler, weigh-master and certified warehouse operator, and a nominated warehouse-keeper for LIFFE, is planning to move to a completely new facility this summer. The new location within the port of Hamburg will have improved transport connections with a more compact form of construction that will enable the firm to offer its customers enhanced handling facilities.<\/p>\n
In Antwerp, Unicontrol Commodity, a well-known operator in the European bulk cocoa market, has also invested in new facilities to meet the growing trend for handling cocoa in bulk, and in megabulk – the trade’s term for bulk volumes of several thousand tons. Recent years have seen a trend for more and more coffee and cocoa to be transported in containers, but in Europe, particularly where import destinations are located close to the major customers, more cocoa is also being imported in break-bulk, often pre-slung in bags for ease of handling, or loaded in bulk directly into ships’ holds for onward transportation via grab handling.<\/p>\n
SITOS Group in Amsterdam is a relative newcomer to the cocoa business but founder Martin Versteeg has nearly three decades of experience in the business. Sitos has quickly established operations in Amsterdam, Ghana, and the UK, including a purpose-built warehouse facility for bulk storage at Hull and a facility in Liverpool.<\/p>\n
The firm has also quickly adopted new technology developed by a fellow Dutch company, EcO2 that offers an alternative to fumigation cocoa with methyl bromate, the use of which is to be discontinued from this year under new legislation. EcO2 specialises in environmentally friendly pest control, and has developed a treatment technique that it claims is 99.99% effective, and leaves no residues on treated products.<\/p>\n
Another important feature of the technology is that pests treated using it cannot build up any sort of resistance or immunity.<\/p>\n
The controlled atmosphere technique pioneered by EcO2 was developed to eradicate insects in all stages of their development in products such as coffee, cocoa, spices, rice and grain, and can be used on the arrival of the product at a warehouse or in a processing plant. The product to be treated is placed in an airtight, climatecontrolled room. Specially built service terminals equipped with airtight rooms can now be found at a number of locations in the Netherlands and in Belgium.<\/p>\n
SITOS is also expanding its facilities in the Port of Amsterdam, where Amsterdam Westpoint is building a 20,000m2 warehouse on its Amerikahaven\/Afrikahaven site for Sitos. Director Dick de Bruin told PS that an initial 5,000 square metres of the new facility – which will comprise 21,000 square metres in due course – was opened in January, followed by another 5,000 square metres early in February of this year.<\/p>\n
The new facility is noteworthy for a number of reasons, not least because it includes a highly sophisticated cocoa cleaning facility built by the Buhler group in Switzerland, which will clean cocoa stored in the warehouse before it is supplied to a nearby facility owned by Nestle. Mr de Bruin explained that whereas most warehouses have some kind of pre-cleaning equipment, the new cleaning facility at the warehouse – which will be capable of handling 20 tonnes of cocoa per hour – would clean the cocoa to the same high standard usually found in one of Nestle’s own facilities. As he also explained, the new warehouse will be served by containers on barge carrying cocoa, but there is also sufficient water depth for much larger vessels, enabling cocoa to be imported in bulk if required.<\/p>\n
More recently, another well known warehousing and logistics firm, Vollers, formed a joint venture with EcO2 to offer the controlled atmosphere treatment technology in ports such as the Port of Antwerp, and opened a new facility at the Port of Tallinn to serve the growing east European market. Now open for business, Vollers facility in Tallinn is served by a terminal with a water depth at the quay of 8.7m, with efficient stevedoring and equipment, and has excellent road and rail access. Within the free port area of the Port of Tallinn, the 6,500 square metre facility has modern surveillance and security equipment and is capable of handling bags in containers as well as conventional break-bulk cargo (pre-slung and non-pre-slung), and will offer value-added services including quality control, sampling, reconditioning, re-bagging, and fumigation.<\/p>\n
In keeping with the trend towards offering value-added services, Bremen-based J Mueller Weser says it is responding to changes in the way coffee is handled by offering new, enhanced services to its customers. “Like everybody else in the supply chain, roasters are trying to reduce their costs. They are looking closely at the cost of transportation, handling, and warehousing, and see warehousing as one area where they can cut costs, ” spokesperson Dirk de Beek explains. “When roasters want to do this it is important to offer them a different kind of service, which meets their needs. Nowadays, roasters like to work in a different way, and we are responding by offering more and more value-added services as more and more coffee is being warehoused at origin, and shipped direct to the roaster.”<\/p>\n
As De Beek says, the company is providing clients with a range of services that can add value to the end product or reduce the cost to the roaster, and is gearing up to provide direct services via barges brought up to its facility in Bremen, taking containers directly from the barges to roasters. Weser is also prepared to accept shipments of coffee as mega-bulk.<\/p>\n
Cocoa complex on stream in Liverpool<\/p>\n
Work was completed recently on a new \u00a31.5 million warehouse for cocoa and other commodities in Liverpool in the UK, following the launch of the first regular sea link for more than 20 years between Liverpool and West Africa. B&P Commodities invested in the development of the storage facility at Seaforth Dock. Most of the cocoa shipped to the Mersey is destined to be transported by road to the Cadbury Schweppes factory at Chirk in North Wales.<\/p>\n
The 75,000 square foot warehouse complex, offering six independent storage units, was built after B&P signed a 50-year lease with the Mersey Docks and Harbour Company, and is served by specialised vessels operated by Baco Liner, which has established a scheduled monthly West African service into Liverpool.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Warehousing and logistics operators at import destinations are investing in new facilities to handle and store coffee and cocoa, including environmentally friendly techniques to replace fumigation. David Foxwell has been investigating.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":2520,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"sponsor":[],"class_list":["post-2519","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-equipment"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/coastlink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2519","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/coastlink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/coastlink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/coastlink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/coastlink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2519"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/coastlink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2519\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/coastlink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2520"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/coastlink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2519"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/coastlink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2519"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/coastlink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2519"},{"taxonomy":"sponsor","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.portstrategy.com\/coastlink\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/sponsor?post=2519"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}