Boxtel, 10 August 2022 – Last week the announcement was sent to you all about Vion expanding its freezing capacity at logistics subsidiary Distrifresh. This project has been started by Sven Janssen (director Logistics) mid-February of this year, after Willi van den Heuvel (Operations manager) initiated the contact with the owner Pierre van den Oord. Together with the Core Team and several departments involved Sven succeeded in taking over the activities of Vriesoord Den Bosch within the planned timelines.

This was only possible with a close involvement of different departments (Connected). Especially the good cooperation with Central HR (Irene van der Spek and Sem van der Sanden), Legal (Stefan van Lieshout), Insurance (Erik Rebel), Finance (Nick van Boort) as well as S&OP, PNF, IM&T, QA and Communications, played an important role to get the deal finished in time and to get the operations of Vriesoord started by Distrifresh as of the 1st of August.

In the coming months the Core Team will be responsible for leading the operations of the coldstore, optimise the volumes and to extend Vion’s independency.

The Core Team consists of Sven Janssen, Pieter Pluk (Operations), Willi van den Heuvel (Planning and S&OP), Nick van Boort (Business Control), Rico van Rijsbergen (Purchase Logistics), Cleo van den Heuvel (Project Support) and Arthur Jansen (Transition Program Manager). This team was highly supported by further colleagues from the Central Logistics team which ensured a smooth takeover in operations.

I would like to thank all departments and people involved to close this take over successfully. This strengthens Vion’s sustainability position by reducing its CO2 footprint, safeguarding the quality of its products and minimising its transport costs. This is a great example of a successful project realisation within a very short period of time due to the good cooperation of different departments within Vion.

Kind regards,

Sven Janssen
Director Logistics Vion