How Solstor’s recent growth is fueling a global expansion
Solstor is a transportation and logistics specialist offering solutions to a large variety of industry sectors. The company maintains a road freight network spanning the UK and Europe as well as its global air and sea services. Graham Doe, Managing Director outlines the company’s inception: “The business started by meeting the requirements of UK fresh fruit importers who demanded cost effective and reliable services from Spain, France and Italy back in the 1970s. While we have evolved since that time, our core values remain focused on providing high levels of service and a seamless integration into a customer’s operation, all at a competitive price.”
Today Solstor’s services cater for customers shipping large and small volumes, with full load and groupage services available to fit customer’s needs, ensuring clients of all sizes can trust the business with their supply chains.
Growth journey
Solstor is recognized as a leading player in the provision of temperature-controlled transport services for imports of food into the UK and exports of food from the UK into Europe. As Graham explains: “Products are transported at a variety of temperatures and include frozen products such as ice cream and vegetables, and a wide range of chilled products including meats, dairy products, ready meals and fresh fruit, vegetables and salads. Each process requires care and skill to ensure the product arrives at its destination in great condition and at the right time.”
The company has further expanded its temperature-controlled distribution services through the provision of Good Distribution Practices pharmaceuticals services. Graham outlines the benefits this brings to the business: “These services sit well alongside our broader range of British Retail Consortium (BRC) approved transport services. Stringent processes, well trained colleagues and a strong quality assurance team are some of the key fundamentals that underpin the operation.
“After Brexit, imports and exports in and out of the UK became significantly more complex. Solstor’s integrated services include customs and veterinary inspections, and this provides customers with an easy-to-use package of services to get their food products wherever they need to be.
“The last five years has seen the business broaden the service offering to provide the same high-quality, cost-effective service to non-food sectors as well,” Graham expands. “An extensive range of products is moved daily including packaging, construction materials, manufactured components and toys. With supply chains becoming increasingly more complex, our integrated services stand out. With a diverse network that brings together various flows of goods into one seamless process, we are able provide a consistent and effective transport solution.
“Our customer and supplier relationships are key to providing the great service we offer,” Graham continues. “It is our fantastic teams working in the UK, France, Italy, Spain, Poland and Belgium that maintain and strengthen these relationships every day. We really value being able to have a local presence with our customers. With the local knowledge, expertise and cultural understanding this brings, we see the company as the transport department of our customers. Working closely with each of them enables us to support a mutual growth because when our customers succeed, so do we.”
Part of what has fueled the recent growth in non-food sectors is the acquisition of McNamara Freight. Graham goes on to outline how this has added value to the business: “The acquisition was an exciting start to 2024. McNamara Freight has been providing freight services between the UK and mainland Europe for 35 years and there is a wealth of expertise in the business to help our growth journey.
Seamless service 
“Our eyes have been opened to new industries and transport solutions and our combined network offering is stronger than ever before. A great example of how the network expansions benefit customers, is that we can now offer simplified supply chains to clients that have traditionally relied on Solstor to transport food products. We can now link them to services such as necessary packaging materials. We are also looking more into how ambient and chilled food groupage services can be integrated, allowing more cost effective and frequent servicing of deliveries in and out of the UK to Europe.
“We are continuously looking at offering new or expanded services to benefit our customers. Brexit hit the export of products to the EU hard and we subsequently expanded our service to help companies looking at returning to selling products overseas. Our operations are serving more countries than ever and in addition to our widespread coverage across Europe we now offer transport solutions from Turkey and Morocco.
“There is lots of interest in our chilled and frozen groupage UK export and import networks and we have been adding to geographical coverage and frequency of service to meet the growing demands. Our capabilities with products of animal origin are market leading and the seamless service removes many of the barriers facing UK exporters and importers of meat and dairy products.”
Graham concludes with a positive outlook for Solstor. “More generally, our transport services within Europe have expanded rapidly over the last five years, operating from our offices throughout Europe. In 2024 we invested further into the teams based in mainland Europe as we continue to push on with the growth of our network and we will continue this investment going forward. We are confident the future will be even more exciting, and we look forward to some fantastic new developments in 2025 and beyond.”