90 years ago, Berthold Vollers started a business as a tallyman and warehouse clerk in the port city of Bremen/Germany. Today, Vollers Group GmbH, now run by the founder‘s grandson Christian Vollers, has 13 business locations with 420 employees in Bremen, Hamburg, Rotterdam, Amsterdam, Dongen, Antwerp, Bury St Edmunds, Genoa, Trieste, Napels, Riga, Tallinn and Moscow, with total warehousing space now exceeding 500,000 square metres.
By Alfons Strohmaier
For the Bremen-based Vollers Group‘s cacao business, 1987 was a decisive year: Bremen was officially recognized as the place of delivery for London’s LIFFE exchange – now ICE Futures Europe. The years of advance work and advanced product knowledge of Vollers‘ management made these results possible. This marked an important milestone in the successful history of the family-run company that Berthold Vollers had founded as a tallyman and warehouse clerk for raw coffee back in 1932.
In the company‘s second generation, Lüder Vollers spent the 1960s constantly expanding the warehouse space and adding turnover in wool, cotton and East Asian imports to its original handling of coffee. Now-adays, the Vollers service portfolio includes coffee and cacao as well as the commodities tea, fibres and textiles, wool, cotton, herbs & spices, nuts & baking seeds, tobacco and refrigerated products.
In terms of volume, cacao is the most important commodity for the group today. The company takes responsibility for the stock rotation of this sensitive raw material through its European port locations. In addition to transport and storage, it also provides services including cleaning, pest control and cacao bean mixing. CEO Christian Vollers explains: “Goods heading to industry usually only stay with us for a short time. That‘s different for cacao as a traded commodity, which we sometimes store for several years.” The license issued by the London cacao exchange now extends to the Vollers locations in Bremen, Hamburg, Amsterdam and Antwerp.
Vollers‘ customers include both large and small-scale cacao traders, as well as industrial processing manufacturers for cacao mass, powder, butter and chocolate. The company is now one of the most experienced logistics expert operations for this tropical nature product that comes to Europe primarily from West African countries such as the Ivory Coast, Ghana, Nigeria and Cameroon. The company‘s raw cacao logistics services include import and export clearance, warehouse entry and exit, and bag, bulk and mega-bulk container turnover.
Experienced, highly motivated employees conscientiously take care of tasks like sampling, sieving, cleaning, pest control and mixing. Vollers’ services also include issuing certificates of origin and the acquisition of phyto-verifications, claims processing and quality control in accordance with the Federation of Cocoa Commerce (FCC). In addition to its ICE Futures Europe certificate, it also has AEO, UTZ and organic certifications.
At present, the industry is facing substantial changes, with the trends moving from containers back to mega-bulk ships. “Shipping in containers is basically not ideal for the transport of cacao beans, because the climatic differences between Africa and Europe fundamentally produce condensation that can then fall drop by drop onto the cacao beans,” emphasizes
Mr Vollers. The longer the cacao is stored in containers, the bigger the problem with moisture becomes, and this has only been made more threatening by the extremely turbulent times container ship transport currently faces. Long sea journeys absolutely have negative effects on pest infestation. “We see a trend toward shipping in bulk carriers as one measure,” says the company chief.
With mega-bulk, the cargo hatches can be ventilated during the journey in order to reduce condensation. And shipping up to 15,000 t with a single cargo load generates a significant increase in efficiency, especially in the turnover rate. Another advantage is reduced port trucking: Fewer containers have to be transported from the terminal to the hinterland, reducing the burden on the sensitive infrastructure at the port and also lowering the CO2 footprint.
To be ready for future challenges, the logistics specialist has built three warehouses at the Hoogtij terminal in Amsterdam. The warehouses are 150 m long, 40 m wide and 24 m high, and they conduct the turnover of the cacao beans arriving via container or ships completely automatically. The beans are transported by conveyor belts into the storage compartments, which can be up to 10 m high. Then, they are removed from storage with the assistance of electric cranes and conveyor belts and loaded onto trucks or inland waterway vessels.
Another innovation generating greater safety with natural commodities is the GrainPro TranSafeliners, which will fundamentally be used for around 70 % of shipments by container in the upcoming cacao season. “Our customers told us about it. But at the moment, it doesn’t look like the GrainPro Liners can be delivered, so shipping will be done without them for now,” reports Christopher Klüß, Co-Managing Director in Hamburg. Regardless of this, the decision-makers also anticipate an increase in efficiency from this innovation. Tests have shown that using the GrainPro Liners reduces the cleaning expenditures for the containers.
The past few crisis years have magnified the challenges for the industry. For logistics technicians as well, the shipping situation, collapsing supply chains, long transport times and
a shortage of container availability have created enormous difficulties. These still unpredictable container transport times make it very difficult for the team to calculate costs. On
top of this, port storage, demurrage and detention drive costs up even further.
On the other side, cacao production countries like Ghana and the Ivory Coast face their own challenges in pricing due to the immense changes related to the living income differential (LID) and quality differentials. For their part, the Vollers Group customers are confronted with an uncertain sales situation as a result of simultaneous recession and inflation. Added to this are rising interest rates and the exit of certain commodity banks, making financing extremely complicated for the customers. Creativity is called for in the trade sector in relation to the Ukraine crisis, regardless of whether access to sales in the former CIS countries remains or not, Christian Vollers explains in closing. “Due to the sanctions and collapse of supply chains, ‘new paths‘ have to be found now. This represents a special challenge for us that we have to accept and are eager to face.”
