EXTREMES are the norm at Reed Boardall, the £50 million turnover rapidly-growing cold storage and transport operator at Boroughbridge, which employs 600 people.

Outside, some of its 230 sleek, high tech white refrigerated trailers emblazoned with ski-ing, skating or cycling polar bear logos, queue to fill tanks at their own petrol station. They are preparing to play their part in the delivery of £10 million worth of food to the nation per day – or £2 billion worth per year.

It gets dark early and in the dropping temperature, with fog beginning to hang, the headlights split into smoky streams to cut the icy air And while baby, it’s cold outside, that’s nothing compared to what it is like inside, where an engine room powers liquidised ammonia through pipes to chill palace-sized buildings to -20 c, vast auditoria with more than 123 kilometres of rack space filled with 112,000 pallets of 5,000 products – ice cream, pizzas, frozen vegetables, burgers etc, destined ultimately for the kitchens of Britain.

There are three of these cold store gargantua whose contents warrant those white trailers travelling 30 million kilometres per year to the “big six” supermarkets and other store outlets all over the UK.

It is easy to see why more than 600,000 orders are processed annually and why the 40 loading docks are handling more than 10,000 pallets per day for Reed Boardall’s food manufacturing clients. Indeed, why the recession last year barely affected production.

One man who would like to see all the “gee whizzery” not only maintained but become even more gaspworthy is the dynamic septuagenarian group managing director, Keith Boardall .

With the chairman, Guy Reed, his old friend and colleague dating back to 1960, he was the founder 17 years ago of this perfect fusion between a cold storage business and a road transport venture.

The bearded Mr Boardall may espouse all the values of a family business (and be a little coy about his age), but he is also something of a ruthlessly shrewd innovator, investing up to £70 million, including new vehicles – none in the fleet are more than three years old – on-board tracking computers which also monitor the mobile temperatures, and the creation of pneumatically controlled platforms within the vehicles to maximise loads.

And it was Mr Boardall who pushed through his vision of that third and biggest cold store which opened in 2008 at a cost of £7 million. Yes, there were doubts as the recession took hold: “It took us awhile to get it going properly but we have been operating it at very near to capacity,” he says.

Will there be another? Mr Boardall smiles wryly and is clearly playing his cards close to his chest. But there can be little doubt that he not only has the money to do it, but the space as well because the whole operation is set within 50 acres.

And if he ever decides that is what he wants, then it will probably happen faster than at other leviathan firms because of his no-nonsense approach to decision-making. Not for him lengthy meetings. “We think about it and one discussion will do it. I will have done the arithmetic and they all do as I say, unless they disagree, when we will have a discussion. They know they can disagree without having to take into account the next salary review!”

Does he have a wish list for whatever new government takes power in Britain this year? Oh yes, he says, quickly: The abolition of bureaucracy generating vast paperwork for each vehicle. He has nothing against vehicle inspections, but while Dutch drivers inspect their trailers once a year, British drivers have to have the clearing papers every time they clamber aboard. “On a bad week we have 7,000 inspection papers, all of which needed to be filled in and filed.”

Would he go public with Reed Boardall? “Oh they keep coming and offering me money. What would I do with it? My wife would play up that I was under her feet. I don’t play golf, or play darts. I just come to work.

“Then again, I’d be asking about the future of the company. Do you remember how Kraft offloaded Terry’s chocolates at York? I couldn’t live with that. We have come from 30 to 600 staff. I’m too old-fashioned”

Besides, he doesn’t care for material trappings. He still lives in the same modest house he bought for £42,000 more than 40 years ago, but yes, he is “a bit long on cars”.

He owns a 1935 Lagonda 4.5 litre Rapide, as well as a 1952 Daimler drophead coupe which he has lovingly restored over the past 32 years.

He also owns a modern W12 Audi AA and what he describes as “an ordinary M series four-wheel-drive Mercedes, badly damaged that very day “when a pick-up truck slammed into me sideways on.”

Clearly, it was to take more than that extreme to prevent him from coming to work.


The big freeze

By Matt Clark

MERCURY on the cooler’s thermometer reads a Siberian -20c, but Steve Flack is as snug as a bug. He whizzes up and down the aisles collecting pallets from the top shelves in his heated ‘reach truck’ – a type of fork-lift plainly oblivious to the arctic-air surrounding his cab. All he is wearing are blue jeans and a grey sweat-shirt.

We are in the cold-store at Read Boardall’s depot in Boroughbridge where Steve and his colleagues swarm, bee-like in this cathedral to frozen foods. Their quest is to satisfy the voracious appetites of the firm’s waiting trucks.

Anthony Rowley appears to have drawn the short straw. There’s no heated cab for him; instead he ferries boxes to-and-fro on a smaller and open-topped pallet lifter. He braves the cold by wearing a padded jacket, trousers and gloves; even his hard hat has furry-flaps to protect his ears.

Anthony looks like an intrepid explorer, a member of an Antarctic expedition perhaps. But his pursuit is more mundane; he is searching for a stack of burgers. Surely it’s like trying to find a needle in a haystack?

Steve looks at his computer screen and it reveals how they find all those needles. Sat-nav directions guide him to his next job; collecting a delivery of ice cream to go into storage. ‘Go to … pick up area; pallet … L86724; product … Brakes value vanilla; cases … 50; move to … 379185.

Andrew Baldwin, the operations manager had promised to show us a ‘big’ freezer. It’s not big, It’s huge; the size of nine football pitches and as high as a church steeple.

A giant version of the fridge at home, it is filled to the rafters with everything from waffles to chips, ice-cream to cakes. There is room for thousands of pallets on the five aisles of coded shelves and everything is neatly boxed, cellophane-sealed and stored in lofty racks.

Outside the temperature is zero-degrees but it feels more like a summer’s day after the deep freeze. Andrew checks the plant room to make sure all is well with the compressors and then it is off to see the drivers.

Reed Boardall’s trucks have been designed to deliver anywhere. And that really does mean anywhere. There is not a part of mainland Britain that hasn’t received a consignment from the company.

A driver picks up his delivery notes before climbing aboard his rig. He is bound for the distribution centre in Daventry, some two-and-a-half hours south. Reed Boardall tries not to dispatch empty lorries so while there, he will pick up a new load to bring back to the Boroughbridge depot. The night’s weather forecast is freezing fog and we decide to head home before it sets in. But it doesn’t faze the lorry drivers; none of them bats an eyelid.