Scale without breaking. Keep your accounts. Survive every peak.
You built this. The orders are there, the customers are there, and the warehouse now decides how big you are allowed to get. Every peak gets survived rather than planned for. One bad fortnight of deliveries will undo an account you spent three years winning.
Achieve every one of these with Infios WMS, delivered in the UK by Balloon One.
One change does the work: replace the coordination your people are doing by hand. That coordination is the ceiling, and lifting it is what lets the next 20% arrive as just another 20%. Balloon One has scaled UK food and drink operations through peak for 20 years.
Coordination handled by the system
Directed tasks, sensible slotting and sequenced work replace lists, memory and a shout across the floor. The ceiling lifts.
Accuracy that keeps accounts
Scan-verified picking catches the wrong item, the wrong date code and the mixed-temperature order on your floor rather than at the customer door.
Peaks you plan instead of survive
Demand forecasting for perishables reads the seasonality already sitting in your data, so Christmas and heatwaves stop arriving as surprises.
Volume without the heroics
A new starter follows the screen and is useful in days. Peak week stops being a gamble on who is available.
Delivered by Balloon One, exclusive UK partner for Infios WMS since 2005 and a SAP Business One Gold Partner.
Growth doesn't break a business all at once. It finds the weakest process and leans on it.
None of this is a failure of effort. Your team is working harder than they were two years ago, and that is the problem: the effort goes into holding the operation together instead of growing it.
A ceiling you keep hitting
Every extra order adds manual work somewhere: a list to check, a call to make, someone to ask. Past a certain volume the coordination costs more than the order earns.
An account lost to mistakes
Years of relationship undone by a fortnight of wrong deliveries. And the hardest part is having no answer when they ask what you've changed.
A calendar of peaks, not one
British produce landing through the summer, drinks demand in every hot spell, Easter, Halloween, then the October-to-Christmas run. Each one a scramble of temps and long days.
“It worked fine at half this volume”
It did. That's the confusing part. Nothing visibly broke. The same methods just stopped holding, and nobody can point to the day it changed.
You have not got worse at this. You have outgrown the method. An operation coordinated by people, on lists, memory and a shout across the floor, does not degrade in a straight line. Double the volume and you need considerably more than double the effort, because every order now has to be reconciled against every other. That is why it felt fine at half the size and feels like chaos now. The method ran out of room.
Balloon One's research with more than 500 UK supply chain managers found the same pattern and named the trap in it: 64% are confident their current warehouse systems are adequate, even as waste climbs. Systems that were genuinely sufficient become the limit as volumes rise, and confidence in them is why the limit goes unnoticed until an account is already lost.
What it feels like when volume stops being frightening.
A good week running smoothly proves nothing. The test is whether the worst week of your year runs without you personally in the middle of it.
Another 20% is just another 20%
Volume goes up and the work goes up proportionally. No scramble, no new coordination layer, no fortnight of everyone firefighting until it settles.
Accuracy that keeps accounts
Deliveries land right, consistently enough that it becomes a reason customers stay. And when they do query something, you can show exactly what left and when.
Peaks you plan instead of survive
The summer glut and the Christmas run are forecast, staffed and slotted in advance, with temporary people productive on day one rather than week three.
It runs without heroics
The knowledge lives in the system, not in two people's heads. Which means the business is worth more, and you can be away in December.
Food and drink businesses that grew through this, not around it.
Balloon One has been the exclusive UK partner for Infios WMS (formerly Körber, formerly HighJump) since 2005, and built the food-specific modules (FEFO, expiry control, cold-chain and ProFresh) that a seasonal, date-coded operation actually needs. Not a generic WMS pointed at food.
Huel
One of the UK's fastest-growing food and drink brands. Infios WMS was brought in to support in-house warehousing through a global expansion strategy.
Virgin Wines
A drinks business whose year is shaped by its peaks, where the Christmas run is not one busy week but the quarter the year is made in.
Classic Fine Foods
Fresh, frozen and pastry to the world's best restaurants and hotels, with short shelf life and multi-temperature stock, scaled across markets.
Birchall Foodservice
A national foodservice operator running ambient, chilled and frozen, with full warehouse transparency and traceability across the estate.
Replace the coordination that people are doing by hand. That's the ceiling, and it lifts.
We deliver Infios WMS in the UK, with the food-and-drink modules we've built on it over 20 years: FEFO and expiry control, demand forecasting for perishables, cold-chain monitoring, scanner-guided tasks, and ProFresh for fast-moving fresh produce. Here's how that answers each of your questions in turn.
“We can't seem to grow past this point without everything breaking. What's the real bottleneck?”
Almost always the manual coordination between people, not the racking, the vans or the team.
Owners usually suspect space or staff. It's rarely either. The constraint is that someone has to decide what happens next (which order, which picker, which location) and that decision-making doesn't scale. Infios issues the work itself: tasks allocated and sequenced automatically, stock accurate in real time, every movement scanned. The chokepoint of everything routing through one or two experienced people disappears, and with it the ceiling those people represented. It also means the next 20% of volume needs 20% more work, not a new layer of coordination on top.
- System-directed workThe system decides what happens next, so growth doesn't add decisions for a person to make.
- Real-time stockOne accurate picture, so nobody is reconciling or double-checking before they can act.
- Capacity before capitalSlotting and route optimisation usually find room in the building you already have.
- Room to go furtherWhen volume justifies it, the same system extends into automation and robotics.
“We just lost a big account over delivery mistakes. How do we make sure it doesn't happen again?”
Stop the error at the scan, and be able to prove what you sent when someone asks.
Delivery mistakes are picking mistakes that made it out of the door. Scanner-guided picking verifies the product, the location and the date code before the line is confirmed, so a wrong item or a mixed-temperature order is caught on the floor rather than at your customer's. That changes the conversation with the account you still have: instead of promising to be more careful, you can describe a process where the error can't leave the building. And when a claim does come in, lot-level records show what was picked and despatched, so you can answer it rather than absorb it.
- Verified at the point of pickProduct, location and date code checked before the pick counts.
- Date codes handled properlyFEFO enforced by the system, so short-dated stock doesn't reach a customer by accident.
- Evidence, not apologiesLot-level despatch records to answer a query or challenge a claim.
- Something to show the buyerA concrete, describable change, which is what wins a lost account back.
“Our year has many peaks. How do we get through them all without a wave of temps and a spike in errors?”
Forecast the swing, keep stock accurate through the surge, and make a temp useful in hours.
The food calendar doesn't give you one Christmas. It gives you several peaks with different shapes, and a heatwave rewrites the order book in 48 hours. Demand forecasting for perishables plans for those swings rather than reacting to them, using historical patterns alongside the external signals that actually drive food buying, weather among them. Through the surge, cycle counting keeps stock accurate without stopping the operation for a full count. And because the scanner tells people what to do next, temporary staff are productive in hours rather than weeks: which is the single biggest reason peak errors spike.
For summer produce specifically, ProFresh was built for exactly this problem. Produce arrives from farms unlabelled and without barcodes, in inconsistent quantities, in varying case sizes and multiple units of measure, conditions that force most operations back onto manual weighing, counting and skilled identification. ProFresh identifies and processes fresh produce directly, which is what makes a glut manageable rather than a fortnight of overtime.
- Jun – Aug
- British fruit and veg in season, with volumes peaking through August
- Any hot spell
- Soft drinks and BBQ demand surges, while soup and comfort lines collapse
- Easter
- A short, sharp peak with a hard, unmovable date
- Oct – Dec
- Halloween into the Christmas run, the longest sustained stretch of the year
- Forecasting for perishablesSeasonal swings planned in advance, including weather-driven demand.
- Cycle counting through the surgeAccuracy maintained without halting the operation to count.
- Temps productive in hoursThe screen guides the task, so seasonal staff don't need weeks of shadowing.
- ProFresh for produce glutsBuilt for unlabelled, unbarcoded farm produce in inconsistent quantities.
“The warehouse ran fine at half this volume. Why is it chaos now?”
Because manual methods don't degrade gradually. They hold, and hold, and then stop holding.
A whiteboard works beautifully at 200 orders a week. At 500 it isn't twice as bad, it's unusable, because the number of things that must be cross-checked grows faster than the number of orders. The same is true of a person who knows where everything is: perfect until the day there's more stock than one memory holds. Nothing failed. You crossed the point where the method stops working, and methods give no warning before they do. The reason it feels like chaos rather than a gradual decline is that the collapse genuinely was sudden.
Which is also why waiting rarely helps. The next peak is bigger than the last, and the gap between what the method can carry and what the business needs widens each season rather than holding steady.
- Coordination cost, not workloadThe thing that outgrew you is the cross-checking, not the picking.
- Slotting and routingFast movers placed to cut walking, so throughput rises without more people.
- Knowledge in the systemThe operation stops depending on who happens to be on shift.
- Phased, not big-bangDelivered in stages that fit around trading. Nobody replaces everything mid-peak.
We've spent a while thinking about peak, seasonality and waste.
If you'd rather read than talk, this is where our thinking on the problem sits, including original research with more than 500 UK supply chain managers.
Exploring the challenges of peak season warehousing
Six areas where peak puts stress on a warehouse, and what to do about each, from forecasting the swing to staffing it.
The complete guide to demand forecasting in the food industry
How seasonal cycles, weather, school calendars and promotions can be built into a forecast rather than discovered afterwards.
ProFresh launches to cut food waste and speed up supply chains
Why fresh produce defeats conventional systems: unlabelled, unbarcoded, inconsistent quantities, and what we built for it.
Why food waste is really a profitability problem
Most preventable loss begins in the warehouse, in expiry visibility, stock rotation and batch tracking, long before anything reaches a customer.
The hidden cost of “good enough”
On the complacency paradox: why systems that are familiar and embedded quietly become the constraint as volumes rise.
Why food distributors are ditching spreadsheets for a WMS
A heatwave doubles cold drinks and halves soup. Those patterns are already in your data. Spreadsheets just can't find them.
The things you're actually wondering.
We can't seem to grow past this point without everything breaking. What's the real bottleneck?
In most growing distributors it's the manual coordination, not the space or the headcount. Someone has to decide what happens next, and that decision-making doesn't scale with volume. A WMS issues and sequences the work itself, which removes the chokepoint of everything routing through one or two experienced people. Slotting and routing then usually free up capacity in the building you already have, which is why we'd look at that before you consider a bigger site.
We just lost a big account over delivery mistakes. How do we make sure it doesn't happen again?
Delivery mistakes are picking mistakes that got out of the door. Scanner-guided picking verifies product, location and date code before the line is confirmed, so the error is caught on the floor. That also gives you something concrete to say to the customers you still have: a described process rather than a promise to be more careful, backed by lot-level records to answer future claims with evidence.
How do we get through every peak without a wave of temps and a spike in errors?
Three things do most of the work: demand forecasting for perishables to plan the swing rather than react to it, cycle counting to hold stock accuracy through the surge without stopping to count, and scanner-guided tasks so temporary staff are productive in hours rather than weeks. That last one matters most, because inexperienced people working from paper is the usual reason peak errors spike.
The warehouse ran fine at half this volume. Why is it chaos now?
Because manual coordination doesn't degrade gradually. The cross-checking grows faster than the order count, so the method holds until it abruptly doesn't. Nothing broke and nobody got worse at their job. You crossed the point where the approach stops working, and approaches give no warning before they do.
Can you implement this before our next peak?
It depends how close the peak is and how much you want live for it, and we'd rather be honest about that than optimistic. We deliver in phases, so the question worth asking is which single change takes the most pressure off the next peak. Picking accuracy and stock visibility are usually the answer. Then we establish whether that piece lands safely in the time available. Nobody should be going live with everything mid-surge.
Do we have to replace all our systems at once?
No. Infios is built to integrate with what you already run, and Balloon One is a SAP Business One Gold Partner with strong EDI and integration capability, so the WMS sits alongside your existing ERP and finance systems rather than forcing a rip-and-replace. That also lets the investment be staged.
We're not huge. Is this overkill for a business our size?
Fair question, and sometimes the answer is yes. If the real constraint is sales or supply rather than the warehouse, a WMS won't fix it and we'll tell you so. The signal that it isn't overkill is usually the one you've already described: growth that costs more in coordination than it earns, and peaks that need heroics. A scaling review is a short conversation that establishes which situation you're in.
Will this work across ambient, chilled and frozen?
Yes. Mixed-temperature operations are exactly what the food modules were built for, with FEFO and expiry rules and cold-chain monitoring configured per zone. Several of our clients run all three regimes into the major UK retailers and foodservice wholesalers on this platform.
Book a scaling review.
A short, no-obligation conversation with people who have taken UK food and drink operations through this exact transition. We'll work out where your ceiling actually is, which peak is most at risk, and whether a WMS is the right answer yet, because sometimes it isn't, and you'd rather hear that now.
What we'll cover- Your ceiling: where the coordination is happening by hand, and what it's costing in capacity
- The accuracy question: what's driving delivery errors and what would stop them
- Your peak calendar: which of your peaks is most exposed and what will be ready in time
- Sequence: what to do first, what waits, and what each step takes
Prefer to read first? The Food & Drink Distributors best-practices whitepaper covers getting more out of the operation you already have: slotting by velocity and by fit, balancing zones, and bulk picking.
Call us and we'll book it in now
020 8819 9071Ask for a scaling review. It's a conversation, not a demo.