McDonald’s and KFC’s bakery business opens new factory
The suppliers of McDonald's and KFC bread buns have new production, warehousing and distribution facilities in Bellville in Cape Town.
The bakery will produce 36 000 buns per hour for distribution to the Western Cape, Eastern Cape and KwaZulu-Natal markets. The facility also produces tortilla wraps, English muffins and numerous other baked product lines.
The R72-million funding for the facility came from Nedbank Corporate Property Finance: Cape on behalf of Swish Property Group.
The manufacturing facility, consisting of 4975m of warehousing and 675m of office space, has been built to accommodate East Balt South Africa, a trading partnership between US-based East Balt Bakery and local listed company Astral Operations.
The distribution facility, including 2360m of warehousing, 1150m of cold storage and 415m of office space, is to be occupied by Digistics, which distributes all product lines nationally for McDonald's and KFC.
East Balt is the preferred partner for the global manufacture of bread buns for McDonald's and for KFC in certain countries. To service the growing McDonald's chain of restaurants, East Balt owns and runs 22 bakeries worldwide, in four regions: the US, Europe, Africa and Asia.
Digistics grew out of the Anderson Dubose company, a quick service restaurant distribution company in the US. Digistics is a pioneer in multi temperature distribution in South Africa and, following a management buyout in 2003, the company has grown from 40 employees to over 400 in the last three years.
Digistics currently operates out of seven distribution centres nationwide and is the exclusive distributor for both KFC and McDonald's, amongst others.
The Digistics section of the facility was completed end-November 2009 and is already operational. The East Balt section was completed end-December 2009 and will be in production by mid-year.
Richard Thomas, divisional executive for the Cape at Nedbank Corporate Property Finance, says: "The Swish Property Group has been a long standing client of Nedbank and has developed and invested in numerous industrial developments over the years. This particular development is slightly unusual in that it has been built according to the strict requirements of the two tenants, who have a strong reputation for developing their products to world-class standards."
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