Pasta for Southern Germany: DB Schenker transports more than 500 pallets of Italian pasta for ALDI

Supply has been secured: With a short lead time, DB Schenker supports ALDI in sourcing several hundred tons of pasta for more than 650 branches of the discount chain in southern Germany. Split up onto more than 500 europallets, the freight is carried directly from the supplier’s production in Italy to Germany. It is a multimodal transport solution involving trucks and cargo trains.

The first 300 pallets with a total of around 400,000 packages of pasta arrived at the railport of DB Schenker Transa in Nuremberg, Germany. A video shows how the cross-docking for more than 200 tons of pasta takes place: https://youtu.be/ZUmcDSf2Pjc.
Christian Drenthen, Board Member for Land Transport at DB Schenker, explains: “We ensure that supply chains in Europe are kept up and running. This is what we are doing all the time. The current Coronavirus pandemic emphasizes the importance of reliable supply chains. Logistics keeps the world running, as demonstrated by our solution for ALDI to transport pasta from Italy to Germany on short notice. We ensure that empty supermarket shelves are being refilled.”
Store-brand Cucina pasta is produced in Nola, near Naples, southern Italy. In particular spaghetti, but also significant volumes of penne and fusilli, are transported via truck from the production site to Anagni by DB Schenker. From there, the products are transported to Nuremberg with freight trains from DB Cargo. After cross-docking, the pasta continues its journey via trucks to 10 regional distribution centers of ALDI. Each of these serve 50 to 70 discount supermarkets.
Andreas Kremer, Director Supply Chain Management of ALDI SÜD says: “Due to our partnership with DB Schenker we are able to react to capacity shortages with flexibility. Our suppliers can rely on us to take their products and our customers can rely on replenishments. When it comes to pasta, there is no need for panic buying.”
As a leading global logistics service provider, DB Schenker transports tens of thousands of tons of nutritional and everyday products every week, including many durable articles like canned food and articles for personal hygiene. The transport volume in this segment has increased significantly since the outbreak of Corona.
Lisa Klonk, European Regional Account manager of DB Schenker, coordinates the current pasta shipments: “Thanks to our network of more than 430 land transport hubs in 38 countries in Europe alone, we remain fully operable. This pays out during a crisis, because we can react to temporary constraints with flexibility. We can reroute traffic when necessary to ensure it always reaches our customers.”
With regard to international land transport, shipments are still permitted to pass inner-European borders. This ensures that countries such as Italy, which have been strongly impacted by COVID-19, still have the possibility to export products – despite economically-challenging times.