Chassis Cab truck delivery helps Thomas Ridley to Keep Up with Expanded and More Efficient  Foodservice  supply

Thomas Ridley invests £1m to boost its fleet and bring further expansion and improvements in supply chain efficiency   

Chassis Cab – the Suffolk and Cambridgeshire-based DAF family-owned dealership – has delivered over £1m worth of new trucks to East Anglian-based foodservice specialist Thomas Ridley who supply chilled, ambient and frozen solutions to the catering industry ranging from pubs to schools and from hotels to hospitals.

The company has taken delivery of eight new multi-temperature DAF EURO 6 LF vehicles specially designed for distribution and urban delivery.  These new cleaner, ‘greener’18-tonne vehicles include automatic gear boxes which increase fuel efficiency and use low emission diesel.  They also include tracking monitors to record speed and fuel consumption – and by incorporating the latest vehicle routing software - Thomas Ridley is able to keep delivered food miles to a minimum.  

All the chillers on the new trucks use environmentally friendly coolant and refrigerant; running off separate electrical generators in the engine further reducing noise and emissions.

In addition to the delivery truck order, Chassis Cab has supplied a Euro 6 CF 460 6x2 space cap tractor unit for use with an award-winning high-specification, multi-temperature DUET Wedge double deck trailer (twice the height and load capacity)      for Thomas Ridley.

The new tractor and double trailer will bring supply chain efficiency to the operation transporting the equivalent of four 13.6-metre single deck trailers on the 216-mile round trip journey from its National Distribution Centre (NDC) at Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk, to a new facility at Paddock Wood in Tunbridge Wells to support the companies continued growth in the South East of England.’

Paul Farrow, Distribution Manager at Thomas Ridley, said: ‘We aimed to facilitate an environmentally friendly solution on this new trunking route; and needed extra delivery vans to cope with increased demand in the South and East of England.  The new order from Chassis Cab has made these further improvements possible.  The use of the DAF Euro 6 CF tractor combined with the new double deck trailer equates to a saving of 432 miles a day, or more than 157,248 miles a year, generating an annual reduction of over 190,000kg CO2 and over £200 in transportation costs.’

 ‘It is clearly also important for us as a growing company to keep our vehicles as fuel and emissions efficient as possible and to present the best image to our customers deliveries.  It is for this reason that we constantly upgrade and improve the range of trunking and delivery trucks we use daily.’

‘Many of our deliveries take our drivers into London, particularly to schools and the wider education sector, and for this reason we need to keep our transport up to date with the latest and more stringent emissions standards set by The Low Emission Zone (LEZ).  We continue to work very hard to minimise the impact of our business on the environment – and how every business now needs to operate.’

Chassis Cab has bases at Ipswich, Bury St Edmunds and Cambridge.  

Robert Baxter, Dealer Principal, at ChassisCab, said: ‘We are extremely proud to be supplying another substantial order of trucks to Thomas Ridley which will help them to deal with their ever increasing workload.  We know that they will be benefitting from the lowest cost of ownership combined with the highest possible profit per mile, all while keeping their fleet operating at its optimum in terms of green efficiency.’

‘We are very pleased to have established this long association with another family business from the region.  Thomas Ridley may be growing beyond all recognition but their values and business approach remain the same – both suppliers and customers are held in equally high regard and for this reason alone it is always a pleasure to do business with them.’

ChassisCab is a family owned business that has been the main DAF dealer for Suffolk since the early 1990s; and for Cambridgeshire since 2014 maintaining the dealership’s status as the only HGV commercial franchise located within Cambridge.  Starting out as a commercial vehicle accident repair centre, ChassisCab has grown to become one of the premier dealers for DAF and a leading supplier of trucks in the region. 

Based at Addison Way in Great Blakenham, Ipswich, Northern Way in Bury St Edmunds, Newmarket Road in Cambridge and Isleham in Cambridgeshire, ChassisCab now employs over 110 members of staff.

Ends

Robert Baxter or Stuart Danson @ ChassisCab on tel 01473 833003,

or email robert.baxter@chassis-cab.co.uk

Tags: