Keep Your Reputation Clean with phs Teacrate

There’s no doubt about it, you have to be fast to be a success in the food industry. Coping with a short shelf life, sourcing reliable suppliers with fast delivery, keeping up with hygiene regulations and constantly competing with rival firms, can take its toll. Not to mention your customers’ panic buying every time the weather turns one way or the other!

Whether you’re a producer, a food retailer or a restaurateur, there are so many things you need to think about when trying to keep up with demand. Staff, produce, premises and advertising all go hand in hand to create the perfect eatery, sought after deli or crowd-pleasing supermarket. No matter how busy you get, you’ll need to keep hygiene at the forefront of all  your plans.

Finding reliable and conscientious suppliers is more important than ever and although phs Teacrate can’t help with the staff, premises or advertising, we can help the success of your business by getting raw ingredients, part-prepared or ready-cooked food from A to B in excellent condition. That means using containers that are hygienically cleaned, with the relevant paperwork to support it.

Our extensive range of food-quality, Returnable Transit Packaging (RTP) trays and crates will not only store and transport frozen, fresh and ready-to-eat food, they’ll appear where and when you need them, washed and ready to use, at the shortest of notice.

No matter which end of the chain you are at – grower or manufacturer; retailer or chef – your reputation relies on products leaving one destination and arriving at another in the same, excellent condition and in good time.

A Crate For Every Reason

Food… we all need it. Fortunately, there are many different ways in which we can satisfy our hunger: takeaways, restaurants, fast food chains, or just cooking up a storm in our own kitchens. Food isn’t just a necessity, it’s a hobby, an entertainment and a way to socialise, so whether you’re nipping to the supermarket with a shopping list based on a recipe from the latest round of MasterChef or booking a table for you and your partner at that little bistro you both love, you’ll expect to be presented with the highest quality of ingredients or menu choices.

As supplier to a food retailer or restaurant, you’ll know this. Customers eat with their eyes, and no matter at which stage of preparation they buy their food – raw, ready-to-cook or served at the table - they want to see (and taste) it at its very best. If consumers don’t like the product, sales go down and your order book suffers.

For your business’ sake, you must ensure that when you send your food products to your customers, they are correctly packaged so that they arrive at their destination in perfect condition. This is difficult to achieve with single use packaging, such as cardboard, which can be weakened by piercing or saturated when refrigerated or frozen. With this lost integrity, cardboard boxes can become difficult to stack and, worst of all, are likely to damage the contents within.

Plastic RTP is rigid and strong, with no fear of breakage. It won’t get soggy no matter how long it waits in a temperature-controlled environment, and with most well-designed crates and trays incorporating handles and lids, they’re both easy to handle and safe to stack. By choosing the right container for the job, your foodstuffs can be transported safely.

No matter what kind of produce you’re supplying, phs Teacrate can provide a crate or tray to suit all of your food transport needs, in a range of colours:

• Nestable Bale Arm Trays (NBATs): particularly well-suited to fresh produce, such as meat and dairy, these standard (H197mm) or deep (H252mm) NBATs are great for use with both chilled and frozen items. Completely compatible with supermarket bale arm trays, folding boxes and other food trays, our NBATs are durable and light and perfectly designed for use on roller conveyor units. Made from industry standard, food-grade material, they can also be branded with a hot stamp or moulded logo to further customise your products. Capacity is 35 or 46 litres with a maximum individual load of 162 kg.
• Lidded Containers (LC): available in capacities of 21 to 80 litres, our lidded crates have a wide range of applications. The addition of a lid makes these tough, polypropylene LC products a secure alternative to trays, keeping contents safe during storage or transport while the addition of security seals will provide even more confidence. When not in use, these lidded crates can be nested, and the optional application of your company logo will make them easily identifiable when retrieving them from customer sites.
• Hygiene Pallet (HP): ideally constructed for a high load bearing capacity, our hygiene pallets can support up to 7,500kg static and 1,500kg dynamic, and are fully washable. The anti-slip surface provides added stability whether transporting or storing, while the food-grade plastic construction removes the chance of contamination from fibrous wooden pallets in food processing areas. At 1,200mm x 1,000mm, the load area is standard industry size, making our hygiene pallets compatible with forklift trucks.
• Pallet Box: available in folding or rigid options, both vented and unvented, our range of pallet boxes are suited to most food-production environments. With loads of up to 4500kg static and 500kg dynamic, they make a robust, heavy duty container for bulk storage. Their rigid construction makes them easy to stack, while the foldable pallet box is an ideal option for premises with limited storage space. Available in standard pallet size (1,200mm x 1,000 mm), they are compatible with other pallet products.

When dealing with food, you can never be too careful so if you’re unsure about the suitability of any product you’ve chosen, just ask. phs Teacrate’s vast experience in the crate supply industry means that we are constantly expanding and improving our range so if you don’t think that we have the appropriate container to cater for your specific business needs, we can work with you to create one that does.

Keeping It Clean

Finding the right tray or crate to appropriately transport your food produce is just part of the puzzle. Food products need to arrive unspoiled and untainted by germs to ensure your reputation and that of your customers.

When choosing any food transit product, single use or re-usable, it’s paramount that you ensure that they are of food grade quality with no risk of contamination by germs or fibres. This is difficult to guarantee when using cardboard or wooden products of fibrous construction that cannot be hygienically washed. With a lifespan of many years, reusable plastic trays and crates also offer environmental benefits that single-use containers lack.

A good tray and crate supplier, such as phs Teacrate, will provide a reliable washing service that ticks all of the boxes when it comes to hygiene standards. Our network of state-of-the-art washing facilities, provides nationwide coverage which allows us to hygienically wash and return trays and crates for our customers’ use, on a planned or ad hoc basis. What’s more, you don’t need to have bought or rented the trays or crates from phs Teacrate to take full advantage of our convenient washing service; we can also wash your own trays.

Whether it’s a rented crate or one of your own, we’ll give it the same care and attention as any other tray or crate – cleaned to the same stringent hygiene standards. Our routine is simple but effective:

• Manually remove any labels that have been applied for identification or tracking
• Pre-wash, main wash and rinse using environmentally friendly, food-safe chemicals.
• Air knife blower followed by heated dryer, leaving the trays and crates with less than 10g of water.
• Load to pallets, shroud and shrink wrap to maintain cleanliness
• Deliver and collect from anywhere in the UK.

Swab testing is carried out throughout the washing process.This rigorous procedure means that phs Teacrate can take the strain when it comes to your hygiene due diligence by providing test results as proof whenever required.

Right On Time

One of the biggest pressures in the food industry is to get produce to market on time, before fresh food spoils or seasonal demand fades. While much of the market fluctuation can be predicted – Christmas fayre, summer barbecues and the traditional big shop before any bank holiday – some are as unpredictable as the British weather. Last year’s World Cup, for example, saw food and drink sales increase as England progressed through the competition. With poor performance in previous finals, who could have predicted that one of our home teams could have made it that far?

At phs Teacrate, we understand the last-minute nature of the food industry. Bumper crops and food fads often result in more produce requiring suitable transit trays and crates at short notice. One call to our helpful contact centre will have the required number of containers heading your way, with next working day delivery as standard on all stocked products and same day delivery available at a premium, thanks to our friendly 100-strong operational team and fleet of over 30 delivery vehicles.

We won’t demand a minimum order quantity to make it worth our while because we know that you’ll be so impressed with our service that you’ll use phs Teacrate again and again. Customers with on-going requirements can request a pool of trays and/or crates and call them off as and when required – leaving phs Teacrate to worry about the storage when not in use, and the logistics of getting them to the right place at the right time, every time!

This supply and delivery promise has helped us to secure the business of providing over 9 million crates every year.

Count On Us

Any business relies on its reputation and the quality of products that it supplies. This is even more true of the food industry. Get it right and restaurants and retailers will be queuing up for your produce; get it wrong and you could be looking at a Health & Safety issue.  Your dedicated phs Teacrate Account Manager can ensure that everything will be put in place to guard against this happening while using our products.

phs Teacrate isn’t just about crates and trays. We provide a comprehensive catalogue of packaging goods which can be purchased from our online shop to compliment our range of RTP products.

The ability to supply an extensive range of quality, hygienic trays and crates as well as accessories and consumables, delivered on time and to such a high standard, has earned phs Teacrate a 5-star Trust Pilot rating.

As part of the phs Group family, you can be assured that phs Teacrate will put your food business first every time we supply a tray or crate because to do otherwise would be risking our own reputation, and we’d never do that.

Think it’s time to try out phs Teacrate? You’ll be joining a long list of happy customers. Contact us today to arrange a free, no-obligation chat about your requirements - you know your business deserves the best.