Consolidation is the Word
4th September 2006 

This was said recently by Alan Bartlett, Director of Albert Bartlett and Sons when the Vegetable Farmer visited their very impressive premises at Chatteris, near Ely. As the United Kingdom’s largest grower of root vegetables (over 500,000 tonnes of fresh produce a year) they have just gone through a £12 million investment programme with a brand new building housing “state-of-the-art” high output cleaning, sorting and packing equipment for carrots and parsnips.

This has brought the total invested in their two sites at Chatteris and Airdie (Scotland) to some £32 million in the last three years.

All this is a far cry from 1948, when Albert Bartlett invested £30 in an old water boiler and cast iron bath to set up a small beetroot boiling operation in Coatbridge, Lanarkshire. Soon after this, Albert, with his two sons Jimmy and Alex, expanded the business and moved to Watt Lane, Airdrie. It was here that the first pre-packing in Britain of carrots into polythene bags was started.

From a single field in 1968, when Albert started commuting between Scotland and England on a regular basis, Chatteris has grown to over 2,500 hectares with the major proportion of it devoted to growing Chantenay carrots. Bartletts are the country’s foremost carrot grower and grow one third of the country’s parsnips. One in six of Britain’s onions pass through Chatteris with most being locally grown but with others sourced from overseas partners with whom Bartletts have been dealing for many years.

The company manages everything from planting to packing so there is a complete traceability with the quality controlled from seed to store. In addition to their operations on their own land, they also agree agronomy and planting with their growers – also taking into account irrigation, harvesting and storage.  They monitor insect activity very closely in order to minimise the use of pesticides and keep residue within the required levels. Advanced technology is used to conserve water and lessen their impact on the environment locally. Of course, this year with the shortage of rainfall, irrigation has been vital and there have been as many as forty irrigators operating 24/7 on the Chatteris land. As Alan Bartlett said: “It’s a very difficult year for us, all this pushes costs through the roof and the crops just ain’t growing!” It is very noticeable that British onions are of a markedly reduced size this year so far.

An important part of this operation is the packhouse (which also incorporates a large chilled store) and this huge new facility is equipped with a new system designed, manufactured and installed by R.J. Herbert Engineering. This is the largest single project (in terms of size and value - £4.5 million) in Herbert’s history. Andy Hubble, General Sales Manager at Herberts, said: “Design engineers were full time on the project following the order being placed in April last year, with 80% of the system needing to be up and running to cope with the Christmas period. 450 drawings were produced and over 200 conveyors being manufactured to convey produce between key machinery”. He continued: “Whilst the project presented some major challenges both in terms of product development and project timescale, we’re extremely proud of the installation and the tonnage it can handle for Bartletts”.

The packhouse can handle 60 tonnes of carrots per hour, 15 tonnes of Chantenay carrots, and 30 tonnes of parsnips. The carrot system receives product from the bulk lorries and trailers into either of two wet receiving hoppers where the combination of spray jets and web agitation initially clean the crop. Each receiving hopper then uses a water flume principal to distribute the flow over two de-watering webs and up a pair of delivery elevators to high output cyclone de-stoners. Flumes then convey the de-stoned crop to two of four 3.5 Wyma brush polishers via secondary de-watering webs and scroll top removers.

Post washing, the crop passes over a bit removal screen prior to a primary inspection area where any gross defects and foreign material is removed. Conveyors then turn the product flow through 90 degrees and present the carrots to a 3m wide lift roll grader where they are split into 5 size bands. The small sizes are delivered directly to the box handling system and the oversize are delivered directly to a separate trimming facility. Sizes two and three pass over single roller inspection tables for manual inspection. The size four carrots are split on to 4 inspection tables because of the volume and then continues in two product flows.

All three main sizes then pass through hydro coolers to lower the product temperature in readiness for packing or storage. Following the hydro cooler, a final inspection takes place before the produce is either presented to the automated box handling system or distributed via conveyors and even flows to multi-head weighers for bulk tray filling.

Carrots for short-term storage or for delivery to the “stand alone” packing lines are delivered through a dividing wall into the fully automated box handling system. This system take stacks of three high boxes, de-nests them, and then using a rolling-road delivers each unit by priority to one of 12 vertical lowerator heads where the produce is gently lowered into the box. When full, each box is delivered by the rolling road to a collection point where it is labelled and collected by lift truck.

Both the Chantenay carrots and the parsnips are handled in a similar fashion, although the parsnips are delivered through a semi-automated trimming facility prior to packing.

A remote control station located on the high level walkway, where the whole system can be viewed, controls the entire system.

After manufacture of all the equipment there was only an eight week period for installation which actually meant that the entire project had been designed and manufactured in just over six months!  An important part of all this is the fact that Herberts are only 27 miles away by road and this, of course, was a great help in installing the machinery and also subsequently with regard to maintenance.

There are 350 employees on this site with a core staff of local people supported by workers mainly from Poland and Latvia. In addition to the fresh produce processing, Bartletts also have a facility for the direct supply of prepared products which includes a dedicated line for the production of “stew packs” (carrots, onions, parsnips and swedes).
A tightly managed and progressive company, Bartletts pride themselves on the continual quality of their produce – whether grown themselves or bought in from their regular outside growers. They have over the years regularly received many industry accreditation and awards – EFSIS, ISO 9001-2000, Soil Association Organic Standard, LAWLABS, Good Food Hygiene 2006, a National Safety Award in 2002 from the British Safety Council and they are members of the Assured Food Scheme. Their Scottish division at Airdrie received in 2005 the “Vision in Business for the Environment of Scotland (VIBES)  and this means that they can enter the European Environmental Award in 2007. Sir Ken Collins, Chairman of the Scottish Environment Protection Agency (SEPA) commented: “Public opinion is changing. Increasingly, people want to deal with and buy only from companies that are environmentally responsible. As this doesn’t mean that companies only consider the environmental effects of their actions as an afterthought, it means that concern for the environment is enshrined in their company culture and plays an important part in all their decision-making processes”. High praise for the Airdrie division but this applies equally to Chatteris.

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