Snowman starts ops at Coimbatore facility, Amazon Pune fulfilment centre
As the next project, it has already acquired land in Kolkata and will be expanding by 9,000 pallets in two phases.
Snowman Logistics has completed the construction of a temperature-controlled warehouse at Coimbatore and the facility with a total capacity of 4,020 pallets has become operational during February 2022.
"It is a multi-temperature facility designed to store products ranging from ambient temperature to -25 Deg Centigrade with 8 chambers, 6 loading bays with related infrastructure that includes G+5 racking system, modern handling equipment and ample refrigerated truck parking space. The facility will mainly cater to the storage, handling and transportation of quick-service restaurants, poultry, ready-to-eat food, ice cream, dairy products, confectionery & bakery products, seafood, fruits & vegetables, pharma, and other products," reads the release.
Snowman also starts its SnowServe facility - a fulfilment centre for Amazon India in Pune. Amazon will be using this facility for the delivery of FMCG perishables including vegetables, fruits, eggs, frozen food, and groceries in the city. The facility is spread across a 12,000 sqft area and has sorting, grading, packing and labelling process lines. It is also equipped with storage for grocery, FMCG and temperature-controlled products. It is a multi-temperature facility designed to store products ranging from ambient temperature to -25 Deg Centigrade with 3 no of chambers, 3 loading bays with related infrastructure that includes racking system, modern handling equipment and ample refrigerated truck parking space.
"Our association with Amazon gets stronger with the functioning of Pune facility after successfully delivering across Mumbai and Delhi," says Sunil Nair, CEO, Snowman Logistics.
During the recent conference call pertaining to unaudited financial results for the third quarter, Prem Kishan Dass Gupta, chairman, Snowman, noted that their focus is to expand capacity by 10 percent to 15 percent every year and in addition focus on dedicated warehouses for e-commerce and pharma vertical which is known by the name of SnowServe.
Snowman Logistics had a total of 113,500 pallet positions and with Coimbatore adding up it is 118000 pallet positions now. "Almost 75 percent of it is frozen but when we say frozen they are convertible to chiller also, we can set any temperature we want between -25 and +25 and around 5 to 7 percent are the ones which are typically chilled cannot be converted into frozen and around 15 to 18 percent capacity is dry," said Sunil.
-While talking about their operations in the Amazon fulfilment centre in Pune, Sunil said, "We bring in stuff to our processing centre for example we bring a lot of vegetables from the farmlands near Pune. We bring it to our facility, sort grade and pack them, we make bundles and packets for home delivery purposes and they are labelled and then they are delivered to Amazon hubs within the city and from there Amazon delivers it at home. So bringing in the stuff, sorting, grading, labelling, packing and then having it delivered to the hub is what we do for Amazon."
As the next project, Snowman has already acquired the land in Kolkata and will be expanding by 9,000 pallets over there in two phases of 4,500 each.
"After Kolkata we will be setting up a pharma warehouse in Bengaluru. We are already setting up an e-commerce warehouse in Ahmedabad and then we are planning to have two more facilities, we have not decided on the locations we are just doing existing customer study with respect to where do they want to expand with their reach and then we will be finalizing the location," said Sunil.
About the profits from different segments, Sunil informed that frozen gives them highest yield and hence their focus always is to get a frozen customer. "Frozen typically would give us a yield of anywhere around ₹1,700 to ₹1,800 per pallet whereas chilled will give us an average of ₹1200 to ₹1300 per pallet per month and dry will give us around Rs.700 per pallet per month that is the typical yield that we have," he said.
Snowman has almost 35 – 36 percent of growth in terms of transportation revenue and around 11 percent growth in warehousing revenue in the last quarter.
Sunil Nair informed that QSR and ready to cook food products has grown by 52 percent YoY for the cold chain company. "But this is also because last year the QSR were affected badly due to lockdown, but still we see a good traction there. So QSR e-commerce and healthcare are the three major segments which are showing promising growth volume as of now."
The fourth thing where we see an opportunity for Snowman is the transportation segment, wherein they had created a technology platform where they are aggregating the market capacity and using that for existing set of customers. "We find that in that business we have grown around 75 percent on a YTD basis if we compare with the last year. We have 110 transport partners who are onboarded on our SnowLink platform and on an average 150 trucks are used on a daily basis through that, so these are the four areas where we are focusing in the near future," Sunil said.
