Welch’s signs deal with Weber Distribution

Welch’s signs deal with Weber Distribution    Welch's, a producer of juices, jams and jellies, said Friday it has signed a three-year contract with Weber Distribution, a logistics and supply chain management provider, to serve as its West Coast distribution center.
   From Welch's Lawton, Mich. manufacturing plant, more than 100 different flavors and sizes of juices and jellies are shipped via rail to Weber's La Mirada, Calif.-based facility. The 203,000-square-foot distribution center contains six on-site rail doors where roughly 260 inbound loads or nearly 450,000 cases of Welch's products are received each month.
   Some of the product is stored in a 75,000-square-foot section of the warehouse, while much of it is immediately processed and labeled for distribution to Welch's customers across the 11 western states. Welch's customers include mass retailers and grocery chains such as Wal-Mart, Costco, Safeway and Vons, as well as convenience, food/drug, and specialty stores.
   Bruce True, Welch's manager of distribution planning, said Welch's hired Weber because of its expertise in handling grocery and solid distribution network.
   'We closed our plant on the West Coast, so we needed to find a third-party logistics company that could handle warehousing, order consolidation, and delivery to our customers,' True said in a press release. 'Until Weber, we were shipping 95 percent of the product from our plant warehouses directly to our customers.'
   Weber processes, picks, labels and transports an average of 425 orders or more than 350,000 cases per month for Welch's.