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DfT figures show that different stages of the food supply chain face different issues. Research into the transport issues surrounding the delivery of food and drink show there are big differences in efficiencies depending on how far down the supply chain you look. Speaking at Scala's annual logistics debate at Wroxhall Abbey near Coventry last week, John Perry, managing director at Scala Logistics, said the  company had undertaken a survey on behalf of the DfT to measure the key performance indicators. The survey looked at 109 fleets with almost 9,000 vehicles covering 1.3 million km a day and considered data on vehicle fill, empty running, time utilisation, deviations from schedule and fuel consumption.

The transport sector was divided into primary, which covers food and delivery to retailer RDCs secondary, which is the carriage of food from the RDCs to the stores and tertiary, which is mainly drinks and is the delivery into pubs and restaurants. "The big primary and secondary suppliers spread the work very well over seven days and particularly make good use of Sunday, while the weekend deliveries are almost non-existent in the tertiary space," Perry says. "When we looked at which fleets were operating over 24 hours we found that primary fleets utilised the whole 24 hours, secondary fleets' productivity dropped by about a third on the night shift and tertiary was almost non-existent  at night."

Perry says the reasons given for this were customer and local authority constraints on deliveries into town centres. The research also showed that utilisation fill is about 75%. "The reasons given for this include delivery windows, customer constraints of pallet heights and product stacking issues," Perry says. Despite efforts to reduce empty running, the research shows that it still accounts for 24% of all kilometres for food and 20% for drink. "There's a lot of talk about food miles, which is the distance travelled per pallet delivered," Perry says. "For primary and secondary deliveries the average is between 3km and 13km per pallet, while for tertiary it works out at between 14km and 50km.

"The reason for this is that smaller vehicles are generally used for tertiary deliveries." The other area highlighted by the research is delays. While congestion was mentioned, the biggest factors in causing delays to freight were issues at loading or customer delivery. Perry says these "far outweigh the traffic issues". Full details of the results will be published by the DfT in the coming months.