The North of England ice cream maker has bolstered its business operations by adopting digital system integration tools and has bought new machinery in a bid to grow the award-winning brand.
Competition is rife among SME ice cream manufacturers in the UK and coming up with delicious products is just one ingredient to staying ahead of the curve.
Lakes Ice Cream, maker of Great Taste Award-winning flavors such as Double Jersey, Thunder & Lightning, and Raspberry Pavlova, used the quieter winter months to introduce a bespoke data and system integration software courtesy of Tract Systems.
It just merges everything together, explained company MD, James Stephens. It’s very good for accounts and for our purchase and sales ledgers and for doing production plans. We can keep track of all the ingredients and other things that we buy with ease. It’s also a very good distribution program and makes a lot of difference to us since we do a lot of our own distribution.
It also gives us the benefit of having online ordering in place for all our wholesale customers and all the retailers that buy from us. They can order online on, via an app or through an internet browser.
It saves us a lot of time
The digital solution cost the company around 45,000 Pound - a purchase which was match-funded by Made Smarter, a UK-wide program that offers funding and advice to manufacturers who wish to adopt new technologies to grow their businesses. Lakes Ice Cream received 20,000 from the scheme towards the initial cost, and the company also separately pays annual fees to the software provider - but Stephens says the additional expense is a drop in the ocean compared to the benefits of going digital.
It’s well worth it compared to what we had before, he continued. The system doesn’t affect the actual manufacturing, but in terms of coming up with production plans for managing stock control, keeping track of stock and raw materials and stock counts, it has made a huge difference. It saves us a lot of time.
Lakes Ice Cream introduced the new system between November and end of December 2021, allowing staff to get used to a different way of working during the less busy months of January and February.
The 'greenest' factory
Since then, the summer has seen record sales according to Stephens, and with that, a growing demand for some of the company’s products, part of which are sold at tourist hotspots like the Lake District and British seaside town Blackpool.
Outside of Made Smarter, we have invested in automated ice cream machinery, which is still being made for us, he explained. We also bought a continuous freezer and an automatic filling machine for our 1L tubs, which makes the process 3.6 times faster.
We are also looking to buy additional automated machinery for the dairy. We make 4L and 5L tubs for catering; we also manufacture for retail stores including Waitrose, Morrisons and Ocado, and have another market for our 125ml pots, which is growing quite rapidly. So that machinery would help us cope better with demand.
