Fewer mispicks, less spoilage, more throughput. No extra hires.
Wrong items and mixed-temperature orders reaching customers. The wrong date code on the pallet. Short-dated stock written off again this week. And a fast-moving food floor still run on printed pick lists, spreadsheets and a whiteboard. Your people are not the problem. The tools they have been given are.
Achieve every one of these with Infios WMS, delivered in the UK by Balloon One.
One change does the work: move the picking decision off the printout and into a system that already knows what is where, which date code is next and the shortest route to it. Balloon One has been building that into UK food floors for 20 years.
Scan-verified picking
The scanner confirms product, pallet and date code before it goes on the order. The error gets caught on your floor, not at the customer door.
Date-code-aware by default
The system knows which batch belongs on which order, so the shortest-life stock ships first as a matter of course.
Shorter walks, sequenced work
Sensible slotting and directed tasks across chilled, frozen and ambient. The gain comes out of wasted movement, not out of your people.
A new starter is useful in days
The screen carries the knowledge instead of two long-serving pickers. 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.
The mistakes, the waste and the ceiling on output are all the same problem wearing different clothes.
Every one of these costs you twice: once in margin, and once in how the operation is seen by the customer, the buyer and the board. The longer it runs on paper and tribal knowledge, the more of your operation rests on a handful of people who happen to know where everything is.
Wrong items reaching customers
A mispick, a mixed-temperature order, the wrong date code. Every one is a credit note, a rejected delivery and a phone call. Enough of them will cost you the listing.
Short-dated stock going in the bin
Product bought, handled and stored, then written off because newer stock got picked first. Margin you already paid for, thrown away every single week.
A floor that runs on heroics
Spreadsheets, printed lists and a whiteboard that's out of date by mid-shift. When the two people who really know the stock are off, the whole operation feels it.
Output capped, so cost goes up
Volume rises and you are left with three levers: overtime, agency staff or another hire. Meanwhile pickers walk the same wasteful routes to reach the same fast-moving lines.
Your team is not the problem. The picking decision is. It is made by a person reading a printout, choosing which item, which pallet, which date code and which route, instead of by a system that already knows what is where and what moves next. A floor with no live picture of its own stock will produce errors, waste and lost output. Every time. Change where the decision is made and all four go together.
Balloon One's Out of Date research asked UK supply chain managers where the greatest opportunity to cut waste sits. Picking and packing came out at the top, ahead of forecasting and stock rotation. The same study puts avoidable food waste at £156,599 per business per year, with outdated technology (37%) and disconnected systems (33%) named as the leading causes.
Out of Date · Balloon One research into the UK F&B supply chainWhat a tight food floor actually feels like to run.
Less pressure on the team, not more. The right pick becomes the easy pick, and the operation stops depending on who happens to be on shift.
Right item, first time
The scanner confirms the product, the pallet and the date code before it goes on the order. Wrong-item and mixed-temperature errors get caught on the floor, not at the customer's door.
Nothing quietly ages out
Shortest-life stock is presented for picking first, as a rule the system enforces. Write-offs stop being a weekly line item and become an exception you investigate.
More orders per shift, same team
Shorter walks, sensible slotting, work sequenced across chilled, frozen and ambient. The gain comes out of wasted movement, not out of your people.
No more tribal knowledge
A new starter follows the screen and is useful in days. Peak week stops being a gamble on who's available, and you can answer for the operation with numbers.
Food and drink operations like yours already run their floors this way.
Balloon One has been the exclusive UK partner for Infios WMS (formerly Körber, formerly HighJump) since 2005, and we're the partner that built the food-specific modules that make FEFO, date-code picking and cold-chain work the way this industry actually needs. That's the difference: not a generic WMS pointed at a food warehouse, but one shaped around chilled, frozen and ambient operations over 20 years.
Birchall Foodservice
A national foodservice operator running ambient, chilled and frozen from one site, with full warehouse transparency and traceability across the estate.
Wing Yip
The UK's largest oriental grocer. Weekly stock checks are now consistently accurate, with better traceability and more streamlined processes.
Classic Fine Foods
Fresh, frozen and pastry products to the world's best restaurants and hotels, where short shelf life and multi-temperature picking sit at the core of the operation.
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.
Let the system direct the work. The right pick becomes the default.
The fix is to move the decision off the printout and into a system that knows every location, every batch and every date code in real time, then hand each picker the next task, in the right order, and check the scan before it counts. That's what a warehouse management system does. We deliver Infios WMS in the UK, with food-and-drink modules we've built on top of it over 20 years: FEFO and expiry control, cold-chain temperature monitoring, demand forecasting for perishables, and scanner-guided tasks. Here's how it answers each of your questions in turn.
“Customers keep getting the wrong items: mixed temperatures, wrong date codes. What's causing it and how do I stop it?”
Stop asking people to get it right from a printout. Have the system direct the pick and verify the scan.
Infios WMS, delivered by Balloon One, replaces the paper pick list with scanner-guided, system-directed tasks. The picker is sent to a specific location and told exactly what to take, and the scan is checked against the order before it's confirmed. Because the system holds the batch, the date code and the temperature regime for every location, a wrong item, a wrong lot or an ambient pallet heading into a chilled order gets stopped at the point it happens. The mistake never leaves the building, and no one has to notice it.
- Scanner-verified pickingProduct, location and date code confirmed on the scan — not left to a printout and a good memory.
- Date-code-aware pickingThe system knows which batch should go to which order, so the right code ships as a matter of course.
- Temperature-zone rulesChilled, frozen and ambient handled as distinct regimes, so mixed-temperature orders are designed out.
- Traceable by defaultEvery pick is recorded against its batch, so a customer query has an answer rather than a search.
“How do I get more out of the warehouse, across chilled, frozen and ambient, with the same or fewer people?”
Take the waste out of movement: better slotting, shorter routes, work sequenced properly across the zones.
Most of the lost capacity in a food warehouse is walking. Infios optimises picking routes and slotting so fast-moving lines sit where they save the most steps, and sequences tasks across chilled, frozen and ambient rather than sending people back and forth between them. The system also directs replenishment before a face runs dry, so pickers aren't stopped mid-order. For high-velocity fresh produce, our ProFresh solution is built for exactly that pace of turnover. Where volumes justify it, we can extend the same system into automation and AMRs, but the routing and slotting gains come first, and they come without new kit.
- Optimised routes & slottingFewer steps per order line, with fast movers placed where they cut the most walking.
- Work sequenced across zonesChilled, frozen and ambient tasks organised together instead of one trip at a time.
- ProFresh for fresh produceBuilt by Balloon One for the throughput and turnover of fast-moving fresh lines.
- Directed replenishmentPick faces topped up before they run out, so nobody stands waiting on stock.
“We run everything on spreadsheets and whiteboards. Is there a better way to run a fast-moving, date-coded food floor?”
Yes: one live picture of stock, and work issued to the scanner instead of chalked up on a board.
A spreadsheet is a photograph of a warehouse that has already moved on. Infios gives you stock and work in real time: every location, every batch and every open task, with the day's work issued to devices rather than written up and re-copied. Nothing depends on someone updating a board, and nothing depends on one person's knowledge of where things live. Because the screen tells people what to do next, new and temporary staff get productive in days rather than weeks: which is what makes peak survivable. And with our EDI and integration capability, the WMS sits alongside the ERP and customer systems you already run, so you get one version of the truth instead of three.
- Live stock, not last night's exportOne accurate picture of what you hold and where, updated as the work happens.
- System-directed tasksWork allocated and prioritised automatically. No whiteboard, no rekeying, no guesswork.
- Fast onboardingThe scanner guides the job, so seasonal and agency staff come up to speed quickly.
- Integrated, not isolatedEDI and integration into your ERP, finance and customer systems, phased rather than rip-and-replace.
“Why are we throwing away so much short-dated and spoiled product every week?”
Because rotation is being asked of people rather than enforced by the system. True FEFO fixes that.
Waste in a date-coded warehouse almost always traces back to the same thing: the newer pallet was easier to reach. Balloon One's FEFO and expiry-control modules make first-expired-first-out the rule the system enforces, so the picker is directed to the shortest-life stock, every time, and short-dated batches surface while there's still time to sell them rather than after there isn't. Cold-chain temperature monitoring logs readings automatically and alerts you the moment a zone drifts, so spoilage becomes something you're told about, not something you find. And our demand forecasting for perishables puts you closer to buying what you will actually sell, which is where the waste stops being created at all.
- True FEFO enforcementShortest-life stock is directed for picking first, by rule rather than by whoever's reaching for the pallet.
- Expiry visibilityShort-dated batches flagged early enough to move them, instead of discovered at write-off.
- Cold-chain monitoringAutomatic temperature logging with real-time alerts when a chiller or freezer goes out of range.
- Demand forecasting for perishablesBuy and hold closer to real demand, so less short-life stock is ever at risk.
The things you're actually wondering.
Customers keep getting the wrong items: mixed temperatures, wrong date codes. What's causing it and how do I stop it?
In almost every case the cause is the same: the picker is deciding from a printed list. Infios WMS directs each pick to a location and verifies the scan against the order before it's confirmed, with the batch, date code and temperature regime already held in the system. The wrong item, the wrong lot or an ambient pallet in a chilled order gets stopped on the floor rather than at the customer's door.
How do I get more out of the warehouse, across chilled, frozen and ambient, with the same or fewer people?
By taking the waste out of movement rather than pushing the team harder. Infios optimises slotting and picking routes, and sequences work across all three temperature zones instead of one trip at a time, while directed replenishment keeps pick faces stocked so nobody stands waiting. For fast-moving fresh produce our ProFresh solution is built for that turnover specifically. An operations review is the quickest way to see where your own capacity is currently going.
We run everything on spreadsheets and whiteboards. Is there a better way to run a fast-moving, date-coded food floor?
Yes. A WMS gives you a live picture of stock and work, covering every location, every batch and every open task, and issues the day's work to scanners rather than a board that's stale by mid-shift. The knowledge lives in the system instead of in two people's heads, which is what makes holidays and peak weeks manageable.
Why are we throwing away so much short-dated and spoiled product every week?
Usually because rotation depends on people choosing the older pallet when the newer one is easier to reach. Balloon One's FEFO and expiry-control modules make first-expired-first-out a rule the system enforces, surface short-dated batches while there's still time to sell them, and with cold-chain monitoring it will alert you the moment a zone drifts out of range instead of at the next stock check.
How long before staff are up to speed on it?
Quickly, because the scanner tells them what to do next rather than assuming they already know. That's the point of system-directed work: new starters and agency staff follow the screen, so you're not relying on weeks of shadowing before someone can pick accurately.
Do we have to replace all our systems at once?
No. We deliver in phases, and Infios is built to integrate with what you already run. Balloon One is a SAP Business One Gold Partner with strong EDI and systems-integration experience, so the WMS sits alongside your ERP, finance and customer systems rather than forcing a rip-and-replace.
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.
Get the warehouse-efficiency guide.
Balloon One's whitepaper for UK food and drink distributors answers the question most operations are asking before peak: how do you cut operational cost and lift facility throughput without adding personnel? It works through slotting and travel distance: where products sit, and how far your team walks to reach the fast-moving lines.
Inside the whitepaper- Slotting by velocity: locate items by velocity, based on fit and picking flow
- Slotting by fit: maximise cube utilisation with locations that fit the item
- Balance zones: distribute velocity across your zones as evenly as possible
- Velocity slotting with bulk picking: aggregate smaller units of measure into bulk picks
Prefer to talk it through against your own operation? Book a short operations review and we'll walk your picking, slotting and rotation with you, and tell you plainly whether a WMS is the right answer for you yet.
Food and Drink Distributors: Best Practices
Every distribution operation has a fixed set of resources: people, equipment, products, storage. This whitepaper works through how to get more out of them, starting with where products sit and how far your pickers walk to reach the fast movers.
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