Darling Romery is a dairy company based in Darling, a small country town an hour from Cape Town, specialized in milk, yogurts and fruit juices, collecting milk from local farms every day to be pasteurized and bottled at its processing plant. It has bought 119 UD trucks over the past two decades. UD models – Condors, Questers, Quons – account for 77% of its fleet.
Keeping it fresh with sophisticated logistics
Modern dairies milk their cows three times a day, so Darling Romery tankers collect from some farms three times a day, while other farms store the milk for collection once or twice a day, starting at 5am. “These trucks work 365 days a year. There are no days off for them because you can’t switch off a cow,” says Pietman Bell, the Head of Distribution.
A different fleet of refrigerated trucks gets on the road at 3am to deliver its products to customers across the Western Cape. The company is one of the biggest suppliers in the region to the massive Shoprite Checkers supermarket chain and also delivers to old age homes, hostels, schools and universities.
A third fleet sets off every morning to deliver product to the company’s depots across the country. Those deliveries aren’t carried out by the company itself, but by four external trucking companies using huge refrigerated trucks to travel up and down the motorways.
