23 Oct AK Stoddart: Two Decades of Purpose-Built Refrigerated Transport for Scotch Beef
Some partnerships are measured in orders, others in decades. Ours with Broxburn-based beef processor AK Stoddart began in 2001 and has continued for the last twenty-five years.
Over that time we have built a fleet of trailers specifically to carry hanging beef from Stoddart’s Ayrshire abattoir to its processing facility near Edinburgh and on to customers across the UK and Europe. The most recent, their 18th Gray & Adams trailer, arrived on site last month.
Customer Requirement
AK Stoddart moves both palletised goods and hanging beef. One driver handles pallet deliveries while the other transports the beef, so the fleet has to cope with two very different types of load.
Hanging beef is the more demanding of the two. It behaves differently in transit and places greater structural demands on a trailer than a standard refrigerated build, which means every trailer has to be built to carry it.
The specification therefore has to be right first time, every time. The structure must be strong enough to carry the weight of hanging beef safely, while maintaining the temperature integrity that Stoddart’s product depends on.
Gray & Adams Solution
We build to Stoddart’s specification, not to a catalogue. Each trailer is engineered around the loading system and structural requirements for transporting hanging beef, to a specification refined over two decades of successive orders.
Because we hold that specification, every new trailer repeats a proven design.
Added Value
When Stoddart’s came to us for their most recent trailer, Gray & Adams, Sales Manager, John Burnett already had the full specification on file. Nothing needed scoping or re-drawing.
As Graeme Brown, Logistics Manager at AK Stoddart, put it, the process was very simple, the specification was ready, so the order went straight into build.
Customer Impact
For a business processing up to 1,000 head of cattle a week and supplying customers across the UK and internationally, transport reliability is the mechanism by which product reaches customers in the condition it left the plant.
Twenty-five years on, AK Stoddart keeps coming back to us because the equipment does the job. It is a partnership that has held up over two decades, and as the business grows, we will keep building to the specification that supports it.
Our Customer Says
“We’ve worked with Gray & Adams for more than 25 years, and in that time, they’ve become part of how we operate. Our trailers have to be strong enough to carry hanging beef day in, day out, and Gray & Adams build them to exactly the spec we need. Ordering our 18th trailer was straightforward, John already had everything on file, so it was a simple process from start to finish. We’ve had a great relationship with Gray & Adams throughout the years and no reason at all to look elsewhere.” – Graeme Brown, Logistics Manager, AK Stoddart
What Gray & Adams Says
“Twenty-five years is a long time in any industry, and it says a lot about the working relationship we have with the team at Broxburn. Hanging beef is a demanding application and the specification has to be exactly right. We’ve built that spec together over many years, we can turn an order around without starting from scratch each time. It’s a genuine pleasure to keep supporting a business that plays such an important role in Scottish food production.” – John Burnett, Sales Manager, Gray & Adams