In Felixstowe, the UK’s largest container port, an eight-day strike has started since Monday. “It was a very impactful strike. For the time being, we still have the delays under control, so there are no losses at the moment. However, we cannot rule out that these will still come,” says Nicole Visbeen of DLG DailyFresh on Wednesday, August 24th.
The port handles 48% of UK container trade and entry. However, the strike is most impactful on the RoRo Ferry that departs from Rotterdam. For the Dutch fruit and vegetable sector, the United Kingdom is, after Germany, the most important market.
However, this requires the transport company to look for alternative solutions now that around 1,900 dockworkers have stopped working. “Normally we use Felixstowe and Harwich. Due to the strike, 2 sailings were cut and we had to partially shift the use of Felixstowe. However, we cannot fully add these on any other sail such as Harwich. As a result, we cut all shipping companies to increase it there.”It is currently a rather intensive period for the company anyway, because it is in the middle of the takeover of the logistics activities of Gist Nederland. “We are therefore in a teams call several times a day with several tradelanes (DailyFresh, Perishables and Gist, which will switch completely to DLG on August 28) to see how we ship everything and/or get it to the UK by road.”
Nevertheless, DLG does not expect to experience too much disruption in the deliveries of products. “We use 9 different corridors, so I expect that we will get out of it in principle. Fortunately, due to the use of several corridors, we are still able to deliver on time. In addition, we always have the Eurotunnel as an option, only this requires a lot of capacity.”
In the next few days, Nicole says, This will not change either. “Of course, the amount of products that should go to the UK will determine how much nuisance we will experience. However, the Greenhouse Vegetable season in the Netherlands is slowly coming to an end and we will have to wait and see what other product groups will do in the coming days. I don’t foresee any problems for the weekend. Many carriers will not leave for the UK on weekends, but we are an organisation that runs 7 days a week. Besides, the strikes in Felixstowe are going well, I must say. The morning arrival in Felixstowe is going pretty well at the moment, but this can of course change quickly.”
