Project Ready - from farm to plate

Coles operates over 2,300 retail outlets around Australia. Their key priority has always been delivering value to their customers. This new Retail Ready facility helps them keep the freshness and quality they are known for.

Coles is a household brand in Australia, known for its supermarkets and as a retailer of 'great value, quality, and fresh' meat. But staying competitive without compromising on quality is always a challenge.

To secure supply and improve the shelf-life and quality of its products, Coles constructed a meat processing facility 40km outside Sydney’s CBD. At 21,040m² it is the largest of its kind in the Southern Hemisphere and the first for Coles. With 12 continuous processing lines, it is highly automated, which involved a major transformation to the way Coles was operating.

Here, retail-ready products for both red meat and poultry can be processed more quickly and be ready for the shelves fresher and sooner; and products can be shipped to all stores in Australia from just one processing facility.

For three years we supported Coles along the way, managing aspects of the project, providing business, change management and technical advice, and helping to launch the new subsidiary – Retail Ready Operations Australia (RROA). We used visualisation posters to help concerned stakeholders to understand the benefits these changes would bring.

By October 2015, everything was in place and ready for go-live. Consumers may not know it, but the distance from farm to plate just got shorter.