IN Brief:
- Unilever has completed a £150 million upgrade at Port Sunlight.
- The project includes a 10,000 sq m automated distribution centre connected to three factories.
- The site is expected to cut primary logistics movements by 27% and reduce CO₂ emissions.
Unilever has completed a £150 million investment at Port Sunlight, adding a new automated distribution centre and upgrading one of the company’s most important UK manufacturing sites.
The project includes a 10,000 sq m automated distribution centre connected directly to Port Sunlight’s three factories. The facility uses around 2,000 metres of conveyors and eight automated stacking cranes, each around 30 metres high, to link production and distribution more closely within the site.
The investment increases capacity, improves operational efficiency, and supports new homecare production. Port Sunlight remains one of Unilever’s long-standing UK manufacturing locations, and the latest work gives the site a more integrated logistics structure for serving UK and European markets.
The automated distribution centre is expected to reduce product movement between factories and off-site distribution points. Unilever has put the reduction in primary logistics movements at 27%, with associated CO₂ savings of 827 tonnes. The environmental gain comes from network design and material flow, not only from fleet changes.
The project follows a pattern increasingly visible across food, FMCG, and industrial manufacturing. Companies are using automation to remove transport legs, consolidate inventory movement, and increase throughput from existing production sites. The business case extends beyond labour reduction into finished-goods control, fewer vehicle movements, and lower reliance on external storage.
Automation-heavy food and FMCG logistics investment is also appearing in the retail network. M&S has begun construction of a £340 million automated food distribution centre in Northamptonshire, with the site designed to serve more than 200 stores when it opens. Although the M&S project is retail-led and Port Sunlight is factory-led, both point towards denser, higher-throughput logistics infrastructure.
Connecting production and distribution creates practical advantages for manufacturers. Finished goods can move from line to storage with fewer hand-offs, inventory can be staged closer to dispatch, and planning teams gain tighter control over replenishment between the factory and the wider network. In FMCG, where retailer service levels depend on promotion cycles, packaging formats, and shifting product mix, those small operational gains can carry across the full chain.
Automated storage also helps address land and labour constraints. High-bay cranes and conveyor-fed systems can increase warehouse density without a matching rise in manual handling or building footprint. That places greater weight on maintenance planning, software integration, and system uptime, particularly where production, warehouse management, and transport scheduling are closely linked.
Port Sunlight also shows how older manufacturing estates can be modernised without abandoning their industrial base. Many UK production sites face a choice between incremental retrofit and greenfield relocation. A linked automated distribution centre gives Unilever a way to add logistics capacity around existing production, preserving site continuity while changing how finished goods leave the factory.
For warehouse automation suppliers, logistics providers, and manufacturers, the direction is becoming clear. The most competitive sites are being designed around flow, not only storage. Production, automated handling, dispatch, and carbon reduction are moving into the same operating model, reducing the old divide between the factory and the warehouse.
