The fulfilment partner who installed freezers for a single customer.
Get a free quoteHow Niblock built cold storage for a specialist food brand — and managed it from launch to wind-down.
Keto Friendly Shop supplied UK customers with specialist low-carb frozen foods and supplements. The brand needed frozen storage, best-before-date monitoring and regulated stock rotation — capabilities most small 3PLs simply don't offer. Rather than turn the customer away, Niblock installed commercial freezers on-site and built the stock-management systems around them. When the brand later wound down, Niblock managed the stock and final fulfilment cleanly.
Keto Friendly Shop sold frozen ready meals, keto baked goods and supplements with strict best-before dates. Three requirements ruled out most UK fulfilment providers:
Frozen storage. Most small 3PLs are ambient-only. The ones with cold-chain facilities tend to be large, corporate operations with minimum order volumes that exclude small direct-to-consumer brands.
Best-before-date tracking. Not just FIFO (first in, first out) but FEFO (first-expiring, first-out). Picking the wrong batch meant a customer receiving product with only weeks left on the shelf.
Regulated handling. Food products require temperature logs, hygiene compliance and clean storage environments — not a corner of a general warehouse.
The founder approached several providers. Large cold-chain 3PLs wanted high minimum volumes; small 3PLs didn't have the equipment. Nobody in the middle existed.
Niblock took a different approach: they asked what was actually needed, then invested in the equipment to provide it. Within weeks, commercial freezers were installed inside the Niblock warehouse. The team built batch-level stock tracking so every unit was logged against its best-before date, and rewrote the picking rules to dispatch shortest-dated stock first.
This is the part almost no competitor could match — a family-run 3PL willing to buy equipment and rebuild its processes for a single small brand.
“They could have said no. Every other 3PL did. Instead they asked what I needed and built it.”— Zoe, Keto Friendly Shop
Frozen inbound. Deliveries arrived in refrigerated vehicles, were unloaded straight into the freezers and logged with batch codes and expiry dates on arrival.
Date-aware picking. When an order came in, the warehouse system flagged the shortest-dated stock for picking — so customers received product with the maximum remaining shelf life, and waste was minimised.
Insulated dispatch. Orders were packed in insulated packaging with gel packs and sent by next-day courier — fast enough that frozen product arrived still frozen, with clear handling instructions on the box.
Stock audits. Regular reviews flagged any SKUs approaching expiry, triggering either promotional sales or controlled write-offs before waste became a problem — keeping the write-off rate well below typical frozen-food benchmarks.
When Keto Friendly Shop decided to close, Niblock handled the exit as carefully as the onboarding:
For e-commerce founders worried about being locked in with a 3PL, this matters: the ability to exit cleanly is as important as the ability to scale.
“Niblock installed freezers for my business. Think about that — a family-run 3PL put commercial equipment into their warehouse because I needed it. When the brand wound down, they managed the exit with the same care they managed the launch. You don't get that from a corporate 3PL.”— Zoe, Keto Friendly Shop
If you're running a food, drink, supplement or specialist e-commerce brand with storage requirements most 3PLs won't handle — or you've been quoted minimums that exclude you from cold-chain providers — we'd like to talk.
Tell us what you need. If it's possible, we'll find a way to do it.
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