Delivering into retail is a compliance exercise with a lorry attached. The RDC wants the right booking reference, in the right window, with product at the right temperature and paperwork that proves it. Miss any of those and you get a rejected load and a service-level conversation with your buyer.
What RDC discipline looks like in practice
Bookings made properly and kept. Arrival inside the window, not near it. Temperature set to the retailer’s specification for the product, monitored continuously, and recorded against the consignment so goods-in can see the whole journey rather than one reading at the door. When a load is queried, the shape of the trace settles it: brief door-opening blips with quick recovery reads very differently from a sustained climb.
Store-door as well as RDC
Not all retail goes through a distribution centre. Convenience formats and independents take multi-drop deliveries straight to the back door, on rounds planned so the coldest product travels deepest and doors open as few times as possible.
Volume without drama
Retail volumes move in full loads. Trunking runs dedicated vehicles up to 52-pallet double-deckers, and cold storage buffers promotional uplifts and seasonal builds, with frozen space across the network.
What a typical relationship looks like
A supplier’s retail orders arrive with booking references attached; we hold the stock, pick against the order, and deliver into the retailer’s RDC network against timed slots, with the temperature record filed against each consignment before anyone asks for it.
The evidence habit
Retailers audit their carriers’ cold chains, and their QA teams ask for records at short notice. Ours are kept per consignment and pulled on request, not reconstructed after the fact. That habit, more than anything else on this page, is why food brands with household names trust us with their deliveries.
Chilled. Frozen. Delivered.
Tell us what you need to move and we'll come back with a clear, no-obligation quote.