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For Auckland-based wine organization Indevin, there have also been significant internal changes in recent years, including the company’s creation of its branded bottled wine (or “finished goods”) division following the acquisition of Villa Maria Estate. In the deal, Indevin bought Villa Maria’s namesake brand, such as Esk Valley, Vidal, Leftfield and Australian import company House Of Fine Wine.
This month, Indevin began bottling finished products on the market for the first time, testing the measure with Encirc in the U. K.
Just Drinks caught up with Tracy Malone, head of logistics and customer operations, as she returned from Blenheim, where Marlborough’s Villa Maria vineyard is preparing to start shipping in bulk.
Tracy Malone: Traditionally, our bulk wine was shipped ex-works, so we don’t deal with freight. The same goes for our finished products – our delivery of FOB branded products.
We recently made a replacement by shipping wholesale finished products to the UK. So we took care of it and it was like, “Oh my God!
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However, we were lucky. The cost of freight is huge [so] we’re constantly looking for features. And one of the features that was introduced just a few months ago to replace shipping lines. We made up our mind to take another shipping company through Panama and our last one was going to be a ship. The ships passing through the Red Sea had just crossed it when things took a turn for the worse.
We were lucky. But, at the same time, we were already asking ourselves those questions, so it turns out to be an informed choice.
In Panama they have problems, but the ships that sail from New Zealand can go through the old Panama Canal, so it doesn’t affect us much.
I don’t think many people realize that there is an old Panama Canal and a new one. The new one is affected by the drought, but the old one works as it has been.
Malone: They’re close to each other, but the bigger one is deeper and requires all the huge ships and cruise ships and there’s a massive displacement of water as they pass by.
The boats we travel on are long but not that deep, so they can pass very well through this ancient canal. At this point we were very lucky.
Malone: It was, and it wasn’t. One of the key elements of my role is to bring features [to the table]. If we had only passed through the Red Sea, we would suddenly find ourselves in a very different situation.
At the time, just before the riots broke out in Israel, we were thinking about the Panama Canal, and even though the old canal is unaffected [by the drought], one wonders, well, how much longer?Is it faster? Is there less risk?
We looked at all these other things and made up our minds to check the Panama route, and then the riots went all the way to the Red Sea.
I think a lot of our consumers who deal with their own transportation now are looking for this direction and I’m not sure how much capacity there is at the moment, because I’m guessing they’re all avoiding the Red Sea as much as possible. .
Malone: It’s almost impartial; Not now, but when we made the decision, it was unbiased. It is faster to get to the UK via Panama. It’s not huge, I think it was five or six days, but obviously it makes a big difference. difference. We have a member of our team in the UK who plans things out and five or six days can make a big difference for them.
With the Red Sea, those ten days, or whatever, to get around Cape Town [some ships take a detour around the southern tip of Africa] would have been a problem.
Malone: It’s going really well. We bottled for the first time this month. It all seems unbelievable. My place of work in Villa Maria was above the bottling line, so it was very appealing to take a look at the bottling line and see how the product is shipped all over the world, but now it is shipped in bulk and to see it on the market is amazing. . Everything went according to plan.
Due to Covid, our logistics have changed. We are much more resilient.
Malone: To be honest, not in Array. We have smart partnerships with our suppliers and other people who help us with transportation, who are experts in this area, and they’ve been fantastic in helping us get things done. Obviously, due to Covid and everything else, our focus on logistics has changed. In fact, we are much more resilient than we were because we want to be.
Malone: Global logistics has been dramatically replaced, and reliability has been replaced tremendously. During the pandemic, our team had to plan almost day-to-day. This has made us incredibly resilient through building more warehouse areas and reviewing options.
Reliability is gone and now it’s coming back. You can plan a week!That said, we are now facing the challenge of the Red Sea, but, because we have this resilience that is inherent to us in Covid, I think we are better able to make those changes.
Malone: Tremendously, of course. Indevin has been shipping bulk products all over the world for a long time. But, to be honest, I guess because we’ve worked with other people who know what they’re doing when it comes to transporting goods and wine in bulk, it’s been fantastic. I find it appealing to see a curved cistern loading wine in bulk, I’m so used to my groups filling them with glass bottles.
A flexible tank is necessarily a giant bag of wine. A 20-foot container can hold only 24,000 liters of wine. They are very sophisticated. It’s amazing the kind of detail it takes to fill those bags. And the quality is incredible.
Malone: No, the U. K. is first. It’s just our big SKUs that we ship, massive quantities.
That’s all we’ll be looking to do across the portfolio. This makes sense, especially when it comes to carbon emissions: sustainability is a very sensible priority for Indevin. Being so far away from everything, we want to have a sustainable supply chain. I believe our carbon emissions in the UK have been reduced by 27% just by making this change.
We continue to follow the same path. We ship the same amount of juice. But simply by doing it a little differently, our carbon emissions have decreased – a whopping 27% drop.
Malone: We’re open to all options. It’s so new that we’ve just started bottling it, but we’re going to look at how we can do things better. If it’s a viable option, I’m sure we’ll look at it for each and every market.
Malone: We only use local suppliers for bottling and packaging, so we haven’t been affected by any shipping issues [in terms of raw fabric availability]. The use of local suppliers has also proved useful during the Covid crisis.
We’re experimenting with lighter glass, it’s not something I control. We already use 67% recycled glass in our products for all our branded wines. They are all bottled in the same position at the moment, in Auckland, with the exception of Encirc’s inventory in the UK.
Malone: We bottle everything in Auckland and ship it to House of Fine Wine and their locations in Australia. My visitor service team used to deal with the House of Fine Wine market, but they got to the point where they needed someone there [in Australia] and now they do it themselves.
Malone: House of Fine Wine has a contract with a company called Mainfreight, but it’s an organizational contract. We use the same company here in New Zealand.
In the past we had our own warehouse at Villa Maria in Auckland, for finished goods, but we recently switched to Mainfreight, something the House of Fine Wine team is already doing. One of the reasons for this is, again, the partnership with experts and the generation they can bring.
We have a warehouse in the South Island and the North Island. We use coastal transportation to ship inventory to the South Island. It’s on foreign ships.
Malone: Our total capacity for finished and bulk goods is approximately one hundred million liters (11. 1 million nine-liter cases).
Lately we have around 6,000 pallets (336,000 nine-litre boxes) of finished goods, but this figure varies greatly depending on the season.
Much of our volume was bottled wine destined for the UK, but now that we’ve moved to Encirc, we’re adjusting to a new average inventory of finished goods.
Malone: Well, actually, the cessation of the bottling of British wine coincided with the time we entered the [Mainfreight] warehouse. We had our own warehouse at the Villa Maria Auckland site and that’s where we shipped our last boxes of finished goods to the UK. There are still jobs and we will be sending about five boxes a month to the UK containing smaller SKUs, so this will continue for the time being.
Malone: We have a distributor in each and every major region: one in Ireland, one in the UK, and one in the Netherlands. Right now, the fashion for branded products is that we send them finished wine. Indevin ships its wine in bulk to similar customers.
Malone: We ship to China, Malaysia, Japan, Singapore, Taiwan, Vietnam, Hong Kong and Korea. These are small commands, but they are the most important.
Malone: We’ve built a lot of resilience in our home chain, and we’re continually in favor of resilience. We’ve been through a pandemic, now we have a war and a drought and those things are going to keep happening. Build a supply chain that is first sustainable, but also incredibly resilient.
The team at Indevin is simply fantastic. There is a culture of innovation, looking for better tactics to get things done.
In our space, bulk shipping is huge, just from a carbon emissions standpoint. It’s an exciting time. The global belongs to us, we just want to make sure we can make it happen.
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