Corby's state-of-the-art 25-acre £60m Europa warehouse - a look behind the scenes

Everything about the Europa Warehouse at the Midlands Logistics Park in Corby is big.

It cost £60m to build. The site covers 25 acres, the equivalent of 15 Premier League football pitches. The shelves stretch to 18m high and are stacked with 9.5 million bottles of wine – and that’s just for one supplier.

Automated picking means that no customer receives the wrong order thanks to an impressive £11m high-tech system.

A 300-strong team works in the warehouse, completed in 2020. More than two-thirds (230) are full-time equivalent staff employed by Europa from operatives to forklift drivers, flow managers to engineers.

Arron Delamare, head of operations at Europa Warehouse Corby, is very impressed by the local workforce.

He said: “We live and breathe warehouse. We are looking to invest in core colleagues. Our workforce in Corby is great.”

Dionne Redpath, chief operating officer of Europa Worldwide Group and warehouse divisional director, is also based in Corby.

She said: “I think that Corby is absolutely wonderful. The team is brilliant.”

Corby operates five key client contracts – four for blue-chip alcohol retailers and one for a healthcare provider.

Customers order a product online and it is picked and packed on behalf of a brand – ‘e-commerce fulfilment activities’ in warehouse jargon.

The average volumes of total goods is nearly 20,000 per day, including bottled goods and healthcare equipment pallets but the warehouse is gearing up for Christmas with a further 150 agency staff being brought in to help with the rush.

Here’s some images from our look behind the scenes.