Customerdriven distribution

BWG Foodservice, part of BWG Foods (one of Ireland’s leading food retail and wholesale companies) has one simple goal. To deliver great quality food on time, every time, at market leading prices. Here, Vincent Brown, Regional Manager, Value Centre Cork, e

BWG Foods own and operate the wholesale business Value Centre Cash and Carry and BWG Foodservice, as well as the SPAR, EUROSPAR, MACE, Londis and XL retail brands in the Republic of Ireland. Vincent Brown says: “From our three main BWG Foodservice warehouses in Dublin, Cork and Galway, and with the support of the additional 17 Value Centres, customer service and quality of supply is paramount to what we do.

“In the past five years, significant investments have been made in both infrastructure and technology in our warehouses to ensure that we are always continuing to improve. We see the support of EIQA and Q Mark certification as the heart of this investment.”

PASSION AND COMMITMENT

The BWG wholesale business first achieved The Q Mark back in 2015 and Brown says this has been instrumental in guiding and supporting them to continually improve their standards.

“The Q Mark is the Gold standard in terms of food safety auditing in Ireland and it is recognised as such by those across the industry. We felt that it was important to show our customers just how important we regard food safety. Achieving The Q Mark helps us to demonstrate this.

“To achieve The Q Mark, we receive an annual audit,” explains Brown. “What we like about these audits is that they are completely impartial and independent from our business. The audit measures four main areas of food safety – our approach, our planning and commitment, our performance, and our structure and services.

“Within these four areas, everything from who supplies our stock, how we receive and store it, and how we pick and deliver it to our customers is checked rigorously. Cleanliness, handling and temperature controlled storage is paramount, so we always have full traceability of all products supplied, right up to the point when we hand them over to our customers.”

FUTURE PLANS

Brown continues: “BWG have been rewarded over the years for hard work in food safety and at this year’s National Q Mark Awards, some of our SPAR, MACE and EUROSPAR stores won awards. As an added bonus, we were also nominated for a national award this year.”

Brown says that every plan, policy, procedure and development the company makes is for the benefit of their customers, and future customers.

“Within BWG Foodservice, we strive for continuous improvement, specifically in customer service. Recent investments in state-of-the-art delivery vehicles, doubling of capacity in our chilled and frozen storage space in Cork, and the improvement in Food Safety Levels from EIQA all help underpin this through the hard work of our own Quality Assurance Co-ordinators, Ciara Bond, Eleanor Duffy and Brian Mason.”