warburtons

I’ve done a bit at Enfield Warburtons, through an agency. The work on agency can be a bit sporadic, a day here and there. They tended to want you to start at 5am or earlier, but I did pick up a few later shifts. That suited me as I have a 45 minute drive to get there. Run-wise, a lot is with double-decker trailers, with very under powered DAF CFs. You could be on a run to Bristol, which is a trailer swap, or down to Kent with a live load. A nice easy day I enjoyed was up to Thetford, usually with a single decker trailer, it was tip, reload with empty bread baskets and back to Enfield.
Warburtons have recently gone in with Tesco, so the workload has been stepped up. Now runs such as Enfield-Banbury-Worthing-Enfield are commonplace, a good chance of running out of time if there’s any hold-ups etc. Other missions include Enfield-Banbury-Bristol-Enfield, also a long day.
What doesn’t help is arriving for work, only to find they haven’t even started loading the trailer. That can add an hour or so on at the start, even more for a decker. You also then hit the traffic which is awful around there.
One of the things I didn’t like was delivering to Lidls, either Southampton or in Kent. As well as tipping yourself, they also expected you to sort through the bread in the warehouse and arrange it by date order and type etc. This delays you big time, followed by the long wait for paperwork.

It’s very much a Marmite job, love it or hate it. They can be disorganised there, I’ve had a few occasions where I’ve turned up and found they knew nothing about it. Luckily, the last time this happened I was used to rescue a driver who’d run out of time on one of the “missions”.
They were telling me that they’ve outgrown their current yard and are soon to be having another over the road as well, to cope with the Tesco work.

From what drivers have told me, the new starters are on a different contract to the blokes that started originally. They’re on a very good package with decent time off, but I think the new starters aren’t so well looked after.

Hope this helps your mate.