First Choice specialises in the supply of spare parts and ancillary items to the UK commercial catering market and is now rapidly expanding its business in the HVAC/R field.
The company is an exclusive UK spares partner for a number of international brands and has direct accounts with all of the leading manufacturers operating in the UK. This enables them to supply from its own UK held stock genuine manufacturers OEM replacement parts together with an extensive range of the most commonly needed universal parts and specialist refrigeration tools.
Sales of refrigeration spares has been a key area in the company's growth in recent years and to offer improved support to their customers they have created a specialist refrigeration team. To head the team First Choice recruited Steve James who can boast a wealth of experience in the commercial refrigeration field. Steve is a member of the Institute of Refrigeration and originally trained at Phillips Commercial as an engineer. More recently he was employed by Total Refrigeration as Technical and Training Manager for Unilever's back-up service to Wall's/Ben & Jerry's brands. It is a growing team which incorporates specialist knowledge of the Refrigeration Trade and is extremely customer focused, determined to deliver the best level of service to the customers.
With the completion of the latest expansion of the First Choice Parts Automation Centre (PAC) the specialist spares supplier is extending its cut-off time to enable customers to place orders up to 5.00pm for next day delivery of stocked parts throughout most of the UK mainland. First Choice completed the first stage of its PAC automated storage and retrieval system back in 2010 and increased its storage capacity by a factor of 9 for the same footprint of the conventional racking systems they replaced. The company now has 12 'Lean Lift' mechanised storage units to accommodate up to 40,000 separate lines of spare parts in addition to the 5000 lines of the larger items held in bulk storage. The computer controlled system with bar code scanning authentication has enabled the part pick speed to be increased by a factor of 5 and reduced the risk of miss picks.