A 20-week project that has been described by Councillor Maureen Holding as “crucial” to the local economy is rapidly reaching completion at the Ampress Business Park in Lymington.
New Forest Ice Cream is a UK based Real Dairy Ice Cream manufacturer and wholesaler. They manufacture, distribute and supply delicious dairy ice cream products, sorbets, slush and ice cream accessories to over 2,000 outlets across the UK, including Waitrose, Tesco and Asda. New Forest Ice Cream produce top quality dairy ice cream, using only the best flavours and locally sourced milk and cream. They do not use colourings and preservatives or GM products.
The brand new headquarters for New Forest Ice Cream will create up to 30 jobs, to add to the 42 current employees. The bespoke design for the build has been created in order to suit the factory’s growing requirements: since 2006 the overall production of their own products has increased by 400%, up from £1m to £4m. Indeed, they are the fastest expanding brand of ice-cream in the UK. The new factory will allow the company to increase production five-fold.
Director of New Forest Ice Cream and Project Manager of the project, Graham Jenman, has confirmed that the new headquarters will be open be handed over by the end of the month and open in December.
The 20,000 sq ft purpose built steel frame building has been designed specifically around the companies production operation and incorporates a long list of carefully thought out details.
The portal steel frame has been designed to accept a purpose built freezer which is predominately independent of the main frame, except where the freezer roof panels are suspended from steel the rafters.
The freezer was supplied and erected by Insulated Construction inside the building, following completion of the roof and wall cladding. The freezer occupies approximately one third of the buildings internal footprint, with a capacity to hold 1000 pallets of ice-cream.
Additionally the building incorporates a 900m² internal mezzanine floor for storage and office use. A further steel framed mezzanine platform located outside of the building will support the new state of the art freezer equipment.
Carefully consideration to health and safety has also been a fundamental part of the facilities design, these include amongst others, a permanent roof edge protection system installed around the roof perimeter and along the floor edge of both the internal and external mezzanine floors, to assist operatives and provide them with a safe working environment when they are working in these areas.
The structures clad envelope consists of three different types of steel based cladding systems; the roof is clad in a kingspan insulated composite panel system, which is ideal for this type of building as it can be installed quickly and efficiently; for example Reidsteels team of erectors where able to install a 1m wide by 14.5m long panel every four minutes, enabling work to commence on the floor slab when the roof was complete in super fast time.
Similar to the roof cladding system, part of the wall area is clad in a Kingspan insulated composite wall panel system, which incorporates Reidsteels aluminium framed windows and curtain walling system. The remaining area of wall cladding is clad in a site assembled, insulated twin skin wall cladding system by Euroclad and also incorporates windows, personnel and vehicle doors into specifically designed and detailed trimmed openings.
A small amount of external landscaping will take place, comprising car parking space and a yard.
Mildren Construction were appointed as Construction Managers for the project, Simpson Hilder Associates were the architects, Quill Associates were the quantity surveyors and Reid Steel were responsible for the design supply and erection of the structural steelwork, cladding and glazing.
New Forest Ice cream now produce their own full product range, including a wide selection of impulse cream sticks, lollies and tubs, and their products sell as far as the Falkan and Channel Islands.
For more information on New Forest Ice Cream, visit www.nfic.co.uk
