UPS Healthcare launches active cold chain transport in Benelux

PRESS RELEASE

UPS Healthcare is continuing its investments in the Benelux in 2022, launching a new cold chain ground transportation service operating across the market with a sorting hub in both the Netherlands and Belgium.

The new fleet’s dual temperature vehicles provide temperature controlled transportation at temperatures between 2 to 8 degrees and 15 to 25 degrees Celsius, ensuring high-quality deliveries to wholesalers, hospitals and pharmacies across the Benelux the next day. This GDP compliant service, includes comprehensive vendor management and digital quality management systems to ensure all customers’ quality requirements are met.

“The past two years have highlighted the importance of the healthcare industry and underlined the complexity of pharmaceutical supply chains,” said Anouk Hesen, Operations Director, UPS Healthcare West Europe. “Technologies enabling end-to-end visibility of location and temperature, are crucial to ensure patient-critical products are delivered where they need to be, at the right time and at the right temperature.”

Driven by experienced and trained drivers in UPS Healthcare’s strategically developed pharma network, this new active cold chain service will include options for next day delivery, door-to-door parcel distribution and LTL shipping in Benelux.

This launch follows the expansion of the Roermond campus in 2021 where 30 ultra-low freezers, approximately 1,900 cold storage pallet positions and circa 1,400 freezer pallet positions were added. Now, with its active cold chain fleet, UPS Healthcare reinforces its support to the development and innovations of its customers.

The transportation service, which adds to the existing cold chain offer in Italy, Hungary, Poland, Czech Republic, and the UK, is one part of company’s response to the growing needs of its Benelux customers, where the total healthcare expenditure represented 10.7% of the GDP in Belgium and 11.2% in the Netherlands in 2020.

As the healthcare sector is growing and showing a trend towards specialty pharmaceuticals and biologic therapeutic drugs – a rapidly evolving market projected to hit 370.14 billion euros worldwide by 2025[1] – precision and temperature-controlled logistics are becoming more important.

In 2021, UPS Healthcare invested in over 36,000m2 of cold chain storage and freezer capacity in newly dedicated and upgraded healthcare facilities in Poland, the Czech Republic, the Netherlands, and Germany. These facilities add to the existing 1 million m2 of dedicated healthcare warehousing across 134 strategically located GDP/GMP compliant facilities in 30 countries.