How We Work
Zest Food Service is a medium-sized business employing nearly 30 staff and working on average over 100 hours every week. It’s a multi-faceted machine with hundreds of moving parts and we work to a Just In Time principle – which means your produce is as fresh as it possibly can be.
What is Just In Time?
Fresh produce isn’t like other products that businesses sell. We can’t store these items in our warehouse for weeks, months or even years. Most fresh produce only has a lifespan of a few days, which means when we get them in from our suppliers, we need to get them out to you within days, otherwise produce will deteriorate, spoil and turn to waste.
And even though we have a large facility, we still wouldn’t have the space to store everything we received on a daily basis, if items weren’t shipped out the very same day.
This means that if we receive 20 boxes of cauliflowers in the early hours from our suppliers, we then immediately distribute these boxes according to the previous days orders onto our fleet of vans, ready to deliver directly to your business.
How we do this
By employing dedicated and skilled buyers, pickers and drivers, we make this transitional process move swiftly and smoothly six days a week.
Members of our office staff take down phone orders throughout the day and evening to compile the items needed on our systems. Our lead buyers amalgamate all of the orders and compile a list for purchase. This process is done a day in advance with standing orders placed with our supplier for the produce we use daily.
Software on our systems aids in the designation of routes and assigns these to drivers.
Once the fresh produce arrives it is quickly stored and stacked in designated areas of the warehouse and refrigerated spaces. Our pickers arrive at midnight and use tablets to put together the orders for businesses on specific routes. These orders are arranged in delivery-drop order on pallets ready for the drivers.
When the drivers arrive between 5am to 6am they check over their individual routes on their work phones for the day and check off the orders that have been picked. Any amendments that need to be made are done at this stage before being loaded onto our refrigerated vans in the order of delivery drop.
Our drivers once fully loaded and signed off are ready to hit the roads early, to avoid the build-up of rush hour traffic and get around their route as efficiently as possible.
Representing Zest on the roads
Our skilled delivery drivers make their way around the route, stopping at businesses in order and quickly dispensing of their cargo into the preferred storage area for each customer.
Many times you won’t see our drivers due to the early starts, but early birds might catch a glimpse of this rare breed – always courteous, knowledgable and helpful when required.
They are the face of our business and drive with care and consideration on the roads and the vans are tracked so that our logistics manager can see where each driver is at any given time. This enables him to update customers on any potential delays due to road incidents and traffic flow.
Prep starts early too
Our prep team are also in early doors working to produce and finish off the prepared vegetables that have been ordered the previous day. They are then arranged on metal trolleys, so that drivers and pickers can add these to the orders that require them.
Office staff
The directors, managers and office staff arrive before 9am depending on what the day requires and settle into their respective roles. From this point, phones can be answered if you have any queries about our service or your order.
Long days
So as you can see we have different areas of the business that are staffed at different times. The buyers and pickers start when most people are just going to bed. The drivers start at the crack of dawn, as do the prep staff and the office staff keep fairly standard hours for these roles, apart from members who work late to take down phone orders.
There is essentially somebody running the business to make everything tick over smoothly for 24 hours a day, 6 days a week..
The Zest way
We have staff members who’ve been with the company for over 10 years and many more approaching that number. We try to make Zest a great place to work and try to encourage people to grow with the business. Occasionally somebody moves on to pastures new and we recruit new staff for the tight-knit teams.
If we can, we’ll reward existing staff and promote them from within the company. We apply this same ethos to our suppliers and customers. Once you come on board, we try our best every day to make you a part of the team and hopefully keep you here for the long haul.
The next article in this series is called Why We Use Direct Debit.