Toga Freight, one of Ireland’s largest and longest established freight forwarders, has announced the opening of another new facility in the UK.
Making the announcement on the third anniversary of the management buy-out that saw Robert Dickinson, Muriel Corish and Darragh Toner take over the company, group CEO Robert Dickinson, said: ‘Our ambitions for growth and expansion in Great Britain are as strong as ever, so it was a long term part of our strategy to open further depots outside Ireland to take advantage of new opportunities and to grow.’
Explaining the rationale for a new depot, Toga’s UK director, Paul Mountford, said: ‘Toga Freight recently joined the UK’s leading pallet network, Pallet Track, and this has opened tremendous opportunity for us in Great Britain. Toga operates distribution services in Ireland for some of Europe’s major distribution networks including France’s Astre Europe, Astre Palet System and Italy’s One Express as well as many other European agents, so the obvious thing to do was to offer our GB distribution services to those networks and agents via the Pallet Track network.’
Darragh Toner, Toga’s Dublin based operations director and group shareholder, explained: ‘We expect our European imports volumes to be significant and therefore a decision was made to control it all centrally with a standalone facility. Tamworth is perfectly located for us, and the 36,000 square foot warehouse is modern, secure and fully racked to allow us to increase our service offerings to existing clients, whilst servicing the EU import traffic without the need for 3rd party help.’
He continued, ‘The warehouse is an ETSF bond, making it ideal to operate groupage to and from mainland Europe and Ireland. We have customs staff on site in Tamworth who are supported by our bigger teams in Dublin and Vietnam, meaning that we have 24 hour customs cover without needing to sub contract outside the group. This, together with the strength of the Pallet Track network, ensures that shipments are cleared and routed for delivery within a few hours of arrival in Britain which we think will offer European shippers to Britain as well as British based buyers of European goods, the fastest and most cost effective solutions for their imports.’