Tesco Use Canals For Wine Stock Transportation

Fri, 19 Oct 2007
 
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Tesco is to become the first major retailer in the England to start transporting its goods by canal.

The supermarket giant will use the Manchester Ship Canal to move crates of wine from South America from the Port of Liverpool and a container terminal at Irlam. Plans are also being made to use other canal links across Britain .

The new move will result in the reduction of hundreds of lorries traveling through the UK, therefore reducing congestion and cutting carbon emissions, the retailer revealed.

Until now the wine shipments had been arriving in the UK at various southern ports by ship before being driven to the Manchester bottling depot .

The move has been made possible by the collaboration of Tesco, Peel Holdings who run the canal and the Port of Liverpool and importer Kingsland Wines.

The new cargo service will involve three journeys a week, with an estimated 600,000 litres of wine, which are supplied from Australia, California, Chile and Argentina, being delivered on each trip along the 40-mile stretch of the canal.

The containers of wine are then transported to a near-by bottling site where they are packed for Tesco supermarkets nationwide .

Laurie McIlwee, Tesco’s distribution director, said: "This move will be like taking a step back to the pre-car days of the late Victorian era when a lot of cargo was still transported by canal, and is a step forward in helping to address today's important environmental issues."

"We are already looking at other areas where we can move freight on waterways," added Mcllwee.

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