Mindset is A-Changing at Frigolanda,
As Company Workforce Shifts Gears
By JOHN M. SAULNIER, QFFI Chief Editor & Publisher

“The ‘New Normal’ for us in 2010 will be seen in an organization that works faster and smarter and communicates more clearly, both internally and externally, to better serve our customers,” says Hans van Leeuwen, managing director of the Frigolanda Cold Logistics Group.

As a a number of key clients plan to grow, so too will this North European-based cold
storage logistics company. The first step is is make the organization more ‘fit for change.’

Operational and structural change is coming big-time to the Frigolanda Cold Logistics Group, as Hans van Leeuwen has generated waves of action that churned up an “organizational tsunami” in 2009 which continues into the new year.

As the Dongen, Holland-headquartered managing director sees things, the best way to serve customers at a higher level is with highly motivated, positive thinking, service-oriented personnel. The surest way to build such a team is by careful, deliberate design over time. And time is of the essence.

Operating a network of nine coldstores with 100,000 pallet positions in the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany and Poland, along with a Benelux distribution transport fleet of 60 refrigerated trucks, Van Leeuwen has reshuffled Frigolanda’s workforce in Holland to the point where 40% of its current staff of 115 people is new to their job. That translates to 21 recruits on the scene today. Furthermore, many longtime workers have had their job profiles changed or amended to increase efficiency.

“We have been working toward a major transformation, which began in 2009. That was our first year of Project Quality Change,” explained the chief executive. “It would have been nice to have had more time to implement needed restructuring, but we had to move at top speed to fulfill growing customer requirements. Today our people are regularly exchanging useful information with a new mindset that enables us to perform better.”

Van Leeuwen and business partner Rudo Teeuwen, who is an information technology aficionado and a hands-on manager of technical issues, have collaborated closely to drive forward the “Next Generation” of customized service for clients. All employees – from 20-something forklift-wheeling order pickers, to 50-plus-year-old truck drivers and dispatchers, to maintenance workers and sales personnel – are receiving lessons via in-house computer training programs and sharpening their communication and creative thinking skills. The “old school” is out and the “new school” is in, as “students” learn at their own pace. They are allowed to make errors along the way, so long as mistakes are not repeated.

“We are inviting our warehouse staff to directly participate in meetings with customers,” said Van Leeuwen. “This enables them to gain a better appreciation for the products and people that make it possible for us all to earn a living.”

He continued: “Our Benelux distribution warehousing system functions more smoothly than ever now, working as an integrated team with our sister companies in Germany and Poland. From Kortrijk and Oosterhout to Dresden and Radom, we are operating as a coordinated organization with a common goal: serve the customer at a higher level. This is possible because our people are reaching for and attaining their own higher levels of competence.”

Van Leeuwen has covered a lot of territory since founding Frigolanda in 1986 at a single location in eastern Holland. While wanting to open the company’s second coldstore in Rotterdam, high costs associated with doing business at Europe’s leading port of entry put that dream on hold. Then, one day in 1989, not long after the Iron Curtain separating Eastern and Western Europe during the Cold War years came tumbling down, a truck driver from Poland asked him for advice on how to buy a load of bananas to haul to eager consumers in former Warsaw Pact countries with pent up demand for scarce imported foodstuffs and other goods. At that moment, the managing director realized that Frigolanda’s future expansion would be beyond Holland.

In 1995 Van Leeuwen moved east with his wife and young children, settling for seven years in a suburb outside the former Deutsches Democratic Republic (DDR) city of Dresden. There, in 1994, he had bought a previously state-owned company and went on to establish three warehouses flying the Frigolanda banner in Dresden, Kamenz and Cottbus.

When this writer met with the chief executive in the Netherlands last Nov. 11, only two days after the 20th Anniversary of fall of the Berlin Wall, he had just returned from Germany. Needless to say, Van Leeuwen’s crew in Dresden remains rightfully proud of its part in turning a slaughterhouse-warehouse that provided meat products to tourist hotels and privileged communist cadres during the old days, into a modern cold storage logistics company serving a unified nation. Today’s client list includes multinational frozen and chilled food companies, as well as a major local dairy and regional firms.

In the year 2000, the company’s services were extended to the Northwest of Germany with the opening of Frigolanda Bremerhaven. Two years later the Dongen site in Holland opened up, followed by the acquisition in 2003 of Eurofrost in Kortrijk, Belgium. In 2007 a third location in the Netherlands was added in Oosterhout, prior to Frigolanda going east again a year later to establish a facility in Radom, Poland.

When asked if more acquisitions are planned or construction projects are on the drawing board, the managing director replied that 2010 will be a year dedicated to consolidation and concentration on further developing the potential of human resources.

“We are always reinvesting in both people and equipment, because growth costs money,” he concluded.