To preserve flavour, colour, consistency and vitamins to the best possible standard, D’arta, a producer of deep-frozen goods, shock-freezes the fresh fruit and vegetables directly after they are harvested. But before they find their way onto consumers’ plates in various forms, they are placed in a fully automatic deep-freeze warehouse made by Westfalia.

In 2017, this family enterprise in Ardooie in Belgium invested in its fifth Westfalia warehouse. This is where both raw produce and finished goods are stored, depending on seasonal volumes. Synergy effects are achieved mainly by interaction between different warehouse systems, so the new warehouse was integrated into the existing intralogistics. This has a positive effect on the economy of the entire storage system as well as providing extra storage capacity. At the heart of the intralogistics is the multi-layer warehouse for the automatic order-picking of layers to form shipment palettes.

The 2-aisle Satellite® storage system provides space for a total of 22,300 rack positions for Euro pallets and industrial pallets, as well as for the containers that hold the deep-freeze bulk goods of the manufacturer. These goods are moved through the warehouse by two storage and retrieval machines with Satellite® for load-handling. The distribution of the unit loads is computed by the warehouse management and material flow software Savanna.NET®.

Peak periods can be handled by means of suitably designed storage and retrieval buffer zones.