Courage Beer backing John Dee
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• The Courage Beer Company has confirmed it is the mystery drinks firm for which John Dee began advertising for contract managers in June ( CM 27 June-3 July).
CBC, the take-home arm of brewer Courage, has been strongly tipped to award its northern distribution to John Dee, but neither company would confirm the rumours until this week.
John Dee will operate the contract from a dedicated depot in Rotherham, one of two national distribution centres. The other is run by Beck and Pollitzer at Enfield.
Although John Dee will not reveal the contract's value, it is taking on 70 extra staff and buying 29 new trucks to service it. The current workforce is 300.
CBC says it is not worried that John Dee is running on interim Operators' Licences and faces Road Haulage Association objections to full licences at a series of public inquiries_ "If John Dee is barred from ramming lorries, we will face that when it happens," says a CBC spokeswoman, "but we are prepared to take the risk because of the quality of service we received from the John Dee Group."
The new contract picks up where a contract signed in February 1990 left off — a three year/i5m deal to deliver to 25% of Courage take-home outlets. John Dee begins work on the contract on 27 August, delivering to supermarkets, cash-and-carrys and off-licenses. 1:1 Courage is shedding 350 transport jobs as part of streamlining since its takeover of Grand Metropolitan. Courage will trim the number of distribution depots from 47 to 29 over the coming 12 months and 1,400 jobs will go through redeployment, voluntary redundancy and early retirement.