George Utz Ltd is part of Utz Group, the global market leader for returnable packaging solutions, with 1350 employees across 8 locations on 3 continents. Its in-house design and production teams create standard and customised containers and pallets for high performance and maximum service life right along the supply chain.
General Manager at George Utz Ltd
Reusable plastic products from Utz are increasingly used in automated logistics processes around the world. Brands relying on Utz solutions include Boots, Bosch, H&M, Jaguar Land Rover, LG, Kroger, Mondelez, Screwfix, Tesco, Toshiba, Toyota, Volkswagen and Walmart. With decades of experience and in-depth industry knowledge, Utz Group remains a family-owned business with state-of-the-art manufacturing facilities worldwide. The UK operation, George Utz Ltd, is located in Alfreton, Derbyshire, and produces millions of units per year across its machine fleet, operating 24 hours a day. Sustainability is paramount and Utz is the only global returnable packaging manufacturer offering carbon neutral production at all its sites.
Russell Evans, General Manager at George Utz Ltd spoke to Warehouse & Logistics News.
What are your best-known products, solutions or services?
Well, with more than 75 years of production under our belt, we have a vast catalogue of products. In addition to thousands of standard products, we offer a range of customised solutions for international blue-chip clients, with many designs optimised for handling by automated logistics systems. We supply totes, plastic pallets, pallet boxes, picking bins, component holders, accessories and various identification technologies. Our plastic containers include stackable, nestable, collapsible, lidded, insulated and food-safe options. Our most well-known ranges include the RAKO (launched in 1965 and still going strong), Stacknest, Internesta, Eurotec and Poolbox.
How is your industry sector performing at the moment?
With e-commerce growth and labour shortages in the distribution industry driving intralogistics automation, the returnable packaging sector is buoyant. Solutions for system integrators form the backbone of our business today, with our products in use throughout the supply chain, from manufacturing to the last mile.
Which industry sectors are your customers in and which ones are growing fastest?
We support clients in a diverse range of industries including automotive, e-commerce, electronics, food, pharmaceuticals and retail. Our fastest-growing markets are high-density ASRS (automated storage and retrieval systems) and grocery automation (in both central hubs and micro-fulfilment centres).
What sets your company apart as a supplier in your category?
There are a number of reasons why customers select Utz and stay with Utz, but the three important ones are customisation, quality and sustainability. Our core business is creating tailored solutions for customers, channelling our expertise and experience to meet their specific logistics requirements and maximising benefits for them. When it comes to sustainability, Utz has a clear strategy and we are the only global returnable packaging manufacturer to be carbon neutral across all our manufacturing sites. Our products have a long service life – often over 20 years – and are then recycled for reuse. In addition, our philosophy of local production, with tools shared across our sites and uniform technology standards, minimises delivery miles for our products to reduce our carbon footprint.
What are your most recent product innovations?
As we develop bespoke solutions that create competitive advantage, our products are often subject to non-disclosure agreements. However, if you are buying goods in the retail, grocery, automotive or pharmaceutical markets, it is highly likely that they will have been handled multiple times in Utz containers. New sectors that we are working in currently include vertical agriculture, fresh food processing and robotic picking of confectionery selections. We are launching a brand-new range of fresh produce containers for fruit and vegetable growers and, in a first for Utz, we are now producing collapsible grocery containers in the UK. We have invested significantly this year in our Euro and UK pallet manufacturing, so that we can now produce these at scale in the UK for the first time. Other recent innovations include new foldable containers for last-mile deliveries.
What are the major trends and developments affecting your category and your customers, and how are you responding?
One trend is lightweighting – reducing the size and weight of containers to improve ergonomics and minimise vehicle loading for lower carbon emissions. We continually invest in research and development to achieve the optimal balance of weight, strength and service life for our products. Another key trend is using certified recycled materials, which we are able to offer for almost all our solutions. Retired products are granulated into UIC® (Utz Industrial Compound), a quality-tested secondary raw material that has physical properties comparable to virgin plastic. Many of our products currently feature 30% to 100% UIC® content and we have pledged to increase our use of recycled material to reach 80% by 2035. There is also increasing use of robotic fulfilment systems today and we have developed modular container solutions for use with pick-and-place robots.
Can you tell us about any areas where you’re currently making technical advances e.g. safety, sustainability, environment?
At our factory in Alfreton, Derbyshire, we invested in two new injection-moulding lines in 2022 and replaced our two oldest lines after more than 19 years of service, bringing the total at the site to 10 and increasing production capacity by 1.2 million totes per year. These new lines are not only faster but also use 50% less energy than the old ones. We are using heat from our production machinery to heat our offices and have installed solar panels on the roof. By 2030, the Utz Group will manufacture exclusively with electricity from renewable sources, which the UK plant already does today. We’ve also invested in the latest mould-design modelling systems and digital process monitoring. The latter has provided us with reliable data in order to optimise our consumption of energy, water and raw materials. We’ve installed additional silos at Alfreton to enable the use of more recycled material as the demand for it continues to grow. Our investment in automation – including the installation of palletising stations at the end of our production lines and the introduction of machine visualisation software – and the deployment of Six Sigma strategies have improved quality, increased performance and reduced waste. In fact, output at George Utz Ltd has trebled since 2018.
Do you invest in staff training and skills development?
Absolutely: today more than 10% of our UK team are apprentices. And more than 30% of our UK employees today have grown in their role since joining Utz – whether through technical training, day-release learning up to degree and post-graduate level or external courses across engineering and administrative roles. Our dedicated HR department enables our team to develop in line with business needs. In fact, our growth has resulted in a doubling of the UK team over the past five years, with the total now over 100 people.
Do you help customers maximise the use of their existing warehouse space?
Yes, our solutions for high-density automatic storage systems, in partnership with a number of system integrators, help companies to optimise the use of their cubic space. Engineering precision is vital in these projects to ensure container uniformity for reliable handling by high-throughput, demanding automated systems.
How future proof and flexible are your solutions?
Utz products have a long service life and they can be fully recycled at the end of it, making them a sustainable solution for the circular economy. This is because we use only single-grade plastics, which are 100% recyclable. Flexibility is also a key feature of many of our products. For example, our ingenious Stacknest containers are stackable in one orientation and – after rotation through 180 degrees – they are nestable when empty. This space-saving design secures volume reductions of up to 85%, depending on the exact design of the container. We supplied over 600,000 of these Stacknest totes – which are a 100% recycled solution – to a major UK online retailer for their recently opened online fashion distribution hub.
What exhibitions can we expect to see your company exhibiting at in 2024?
Our UK team will be at IntraLogisteX at the NEC (19-20 March) and IWLEX in Stoneleigh (14-15 May). On the international stage, Utz will be exhibiting at MODEX in Atlanta (11-14 March) and LogiMAT in Stuttgart (19-21 March).
How would you sum up your company in three words?
For Utz we actually have four words: Creative, Sustainable Packaging Innovation.
GEORGE UTZ LTD
01773 543170
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