Fife Creamery, one Scotland’s leading chilled and frozen food wholesalers, modernized their fleet adding new vehicles featuring engineless refrigeration systems from Thermo King, a leader in transport temperature control solutions and a brand of Trane Technologies. The fleet upgrade aligns with Fife Creamery’s strategy to improve efficiency and sustainability of their operations and move away from diesel-powered units to more environmentally friendly solutions. The 30 new 7.5-tonne trucks feature high performance, compressor-driven Thermo King V-800 units and two new 18-tonne vehicles pulling drawbar trailers equipped with Frigoblock FK25RL inverter-powered systems.
“By partnering with our customers, we can help accelerate the industry’s transformation to electrification, proving that sustainable and diesel-free transport refrigeration is possible without compromising the cold chain,” said Jon Jerrard-Dinn, sales manager UK at Thermo King. “Our collaboration with Fife Creamery demonstrates that Thermo King has the solutions that already today allow transporters to move away from diesel-powered refrigeration. We can help them lower their carbon footprint, reduce the impact of rising fuel costs and keep transporting food and perishable goods efficiently and reliably.”
“Fife Creamery operates long-haul and intensive deliveries in busy urban centres such as Edinburgh, Glasgow and Aberdeen. Rising fuel costs and expanding low emission urban zones across the country has put emission reduction, fuel efficiency and performance at the forefront of priorities when selecting new vehicles and refrigeration systems for our fleet,” said Richard Wishart, logistics manager at Fife Creamery. “Thermo King and Frigoblock technologies proved capable to deliver the desired performance we required and allowed us to move away from the diesel-powered refrigeration, which has been typically used in this market segment before.”
The project started when Fife Creamery approached Thermo King looking for diesel-free refrigeration systems for their two new drawbar trailer vehicles. The company needed a high- performance system that would be capable to cope with the high demand, multi-drop operations environment, while delivering fuel savings and emissions reduction. The Frigoblock FK25RL unit powered by an alternator and inverter system ticked all the boxes and proved to be the right solution for the 18-tonners.
Successful implementation of the Frigoblock systems, triggered Fife Creamery’s interest in Thermo King’s high-power compressor driven solutions for their new fleet of 7.5-tonne vehicles. Convinced not to install diesel-fuelled refrigeration systems, Fife Creamery decided on the multi-temperature V-800 MAX Spectrum as the right solution for their high-demand operations. Approximately 250kg lower weight of the V-800 units compared to an equivalent diesel-powered system turned to be an additional benefit next to fuel and emission reduction, allowing Fife Creamery to increase their vehicles’ payload on each route.
Fife Creamery estimates that by choosing Thermo King’s diesel-free refrigeration systems, they will reduce their fuel consumption by between 128,000 to 200,000 litres, equivalent to emitting between 336,640 and 526,000 kg of CO2 and a representing a cost of £192,000 to £350,000 per year.
Most of Fife Creamery’s new fleet are already in operation and deliver chilled, frozen and ambient-temperature products to customers from independent sandwich bars and butcher’s shops to large retail chains, restaurants and hotels.