Mysterious sheds at the heart of our food supply

Launching a new Food Tracer resource: a growing list of regional distribution centres

Regional distribution centres: the name is almost as dull as the nondescript buildings.

So anonymously designed that we give them barely a second glance, these giant sheds have played a pivotal role in the journey of our food since the major retailers started taking greater control of the food supply chain in the 1970s. Most of the food we eat will have passed through a regional distribution centre (RDC) on its way to our plates.

Unceasing movement

The only hint of activity outside the blank walls is the incessant coming and going of hundreds of articulated lorries; inside the activity is more frenetic, as our food is moved from delivery bay to storage to loading bay. Much of the activity is automated though hundreds of staff are required to log, manage and shift. Many RDCs operate 364 days a year – only Christmas is sacred.

The food system’s lynchpin

Almost all supermarket food (80% of the food we eat at home), and much sold by independent retailers too, is supplied via RDCs: trucked in from the producers, packhouses and manufacturers; briefly stored (warehouse time and space is money); then trucked out again on the supermarkets’ dedicated fleets. Fresh milk and, bizarrely, some dried herbs are amongst the few foodstuffs delivered direct to stores. (Some retailers are now moving some of their sourcing back to more direct and local supplies: Waitrose “is experimenting with allowing local suppliers to deliver direct to shops”, while ASDA has developed a network of independent local hubs supplying more locally sourced food.)

RDCs are the lynchpin of our food system, the central focus of the supply chain, the narrowest part of an hourglass that funnels food from millions of farmers worldwide, via thousands of manufacturers, through perhaps a few hundred RDCs, out to thousands of stores, to feed millions of consumers.

Big boxes

Handling so much of our food, RDCs are necessarily enormous, each serving dozens of stores (Tesco has over 2,100 stores in the UK, supplied from 24 distribution centres) almost every day of the year. The 1,220 staff at Fenny Lock, just one of Tesco’s depots, were reported to have handled 11.5 million bottles of wine and 13 million cases of mince pies in December 2008. Some RDCs only handle particular categories of product, such as ambient, chilled or frozen, while others cover a wider range.

Inevitably, the size of RDCs is popularly measured in football pitches: Fenny Lock is said to cover an area the size of 10 pitches, the one shown in the BBC’s Britain From Above’s fascinating insight into an RDC’s inner workings is even bigger at 13. Seeing as there’s no one standard size for a football pitch, The Tracing Paper will abandon the convention and specify sizes in fixed units.

Controlling more of the food supply chain

Some supermarkets, such as Sainsbury’s, have supplemented their RDC network with primary consolidation centres (PCCs), even more warehouses for the immediate storage of manufacturers’ products. Producers are encouraged to send their products straight to a PCC rather than storing them themselves. The supermarket then has control over and responsibility for onward supply to their RDCs, but ownership of the products remains with the manufacturer until arrival at the RDC.

Uncovering the mystery

Despite their size and the crucial role they play in our food supply, RDCs go mostly unnoticed and are little known. There’s no simple way to find out where they are, how many there are, or which of them has supplied the food any one of us eats. Always hungry for information on the origins of our food, The Tracing Paper is launching a new Food Tracer resource: a partial but growing list of RDCs.

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Sainsbury’s Chilled and Ambient RDC at Waltham Point