UK: Construction of a £5m food packhouse completed

The construction of a £5m food packhouse has been completed. There, millions of cucumbers and tomatoes will be automatically weighed, sorted, quality checked, and stored, ready for delivery to supermarkets.

The project for Fenland Glasshouse Limited, a company owned by funds managed by Schroders Greencoat LLP, was completed on time in just under a year.

The 3,500 square meter facility has now been handed over after some final additional requests were completed, with the site now fully operational and handling more than a million cucumbers and 600,000 packets of tomatoes a week.

The process within the packhouse is almost entirely automated once cucumbers and tomatoes have been picked from the adjacent glasshouse, which is one of the largest ever constructed in the UK with a footprint of over 22 hectares.

They are collected and graded into sizes, quality checked, wrapped and boxed, ready to be collected and delivered to several large UK supermarkets the next day.

Zoned areas created at ideal temperatures
“This has been an exceptional project to be involved in, and we were thrilled to be chosen to design and build this facility at CambridgeHOK, especially given the advanced technologies and levels of automation involved within the packhouse,” said project manager Elliot Wrightson.

“The processes inside meant that the packhouse had to be built to a size which ensured it had the capacity required, given the huge level of daily fruit production in the glasshouse, and it also had to be designed and built in a Venlo style, as it connects directly to the glasshouse.

“Considerations also had to be made in the design for the high levels of automation within the packhouse and for there to be zoned areas with differing temperatures in the packing hall, the tomato zone, and the cucumber zone.”