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In a cold store, the densest storage system on paper isn't always the one that delivers the best ROI. It comes down to t...
03/09/2026

In a cold store, the densest storage system on paper isn't always the one that delivers the best ROI. It comes down to the number of SKUs you are storing and the complexity of throughput for each.

Take drive-in racking. For the right profile, few products, high volume per line, steady movement, it's an excellent use of cold space: deep lanes, minimal aisles, a lot of pallets per square metre, and low cost per pallet position.

When the stock suits it, it can be the right call, and we install it for precisely those situations.

The key word is suits.

If you take the same system and try to store a wide range of SKUs, each with different demands and throughputs, you get an entirely different result.

Each lane is tied to a single product, so with lots of part-used lines you get honeycombing: positions that are technically occupied but can't be filled, refrigerated around the clock while earning nothing.

Same racking, same pallet count on the drawing, very different real-world utilisation.

That's the distinction that matters in a freezer, where every cubic metre is chilled to minus 25. Density is how much you can fit in. Utilisation is how much you can actually use at any moment.

Drive-in, push-back, mobile, shuttle and full automation each deliver a different amount of usable cold volume for a different stock profile. There's no single best system, only the best fit.

Which is why we start every cold store project with the data: the SKU profile, the movement patterns, the throughput. Get that right and the system often chooses itself.

If your SKU range has grown since your racking went in, is it still the right fit?

02/09/2026

We design and install fantastic automated storage systems. But we'll also tell you when you don't need one.

That sounds like a strange thing for a company that specialises in automated warehouse storage to say, but it's the whole basis of how we work. If our focus was "how do we sell the biggest system" we'd end up solving the wrong problem beautifully.

Some sites genuinely need full automation: serious step-ups in capacity, control and safety, all at once. Others need a high-density shuttle system that fits far more into the existing footprint without the cost of automating everything. Others need conventional racking, designed properly around how their stock actually moves. And plenty need a mix, different storage strategies in different parts of the same building, because no single system is right for every SKU.

The right answer depends on your products, your throughput, your site and your business case. Not on what we'd most like to quote.

Thirty years and more than ten thousand projects have taught us that the best outcomes come from the projects where nobody decided the answer before understanding the problem. Sometimes that's full automation. Often, it's something simpler that does exactly what's needed.

Start with the problem. Analyse the data. Let it determine the solution. That order matters more than almost anything else in a storage project, and that's how we keep Clients For Life.

Your slowest-moving stock could be costing you far more space than you think, and slowing your picking down more than yo...
01/09/2026

Your slowest-moving stock could be costing you far more space than you think, and slowing your picking down more than you realise.

It's an easy trap. Fast and slow movers get stored the same way, on the same pallet racking, across the same floor. So the SKUs you pick once a month sit in prime, accessible positions your fastest lines are crying out for.

But the bigger cost is the air. A slow-moving pallet on a standard beam level leaves the full pallet height above it empty, because nothing else can go there. One SKU, sterilising all the space around and above it. Do that across every slow line in the building and you've got a vast volume of dead air locked into the racking, paid for and doing nothing.

The fix is simpler than it sounds. Take the slow and medium movers out of pallet racking altogether and put them on shelving designed to suit the products themselves. Smaller items stored at sensible heights, at sensible densities, instead of one lonely pallet swallowing a full bay. Space utilisation improves the moment you do it.

But the biggest benefit is often picking speed. Think about how slow lines get picked today. If they're stored up high on pallet racking, someone has to bring a forklift over, lift the pallet down, let the picker take what they need, then put it back up again. For a single slow-moving item. Move those lines to accessible shelving and that whole forklift dance disappears. The picker walks up and picks. Faster, safer, and it frees the forklifts for the work that actually needs them.

Build that shelving upwards into a multi-tier picking tower and the gains compound. Full use of the height, controlled access designed in for high-value or sensitive stock, and pallet and goods lifts moving stock between levels safely instead of people carrying loads up and down or manhandling them on stairs.

Height is the most underused asset in most warehouses, and slow-moving stock is where most of it gets wasted.

Store it the right way and you win twice: on space, and on speed.

How much of your cold store is refrigerating empty space?Because at minus 25, empty space is the most expensive space yo...
27/08/2026

How much of your cold store is refrigerating empty space?

Because at minus 25, empty space is the most expensive space you own. That's not a rounding error. It's one of your biggest running costs, hiding in plain sight.

In an ambient warehouse, poor space utilisation costs you rent. In a cold store, it costs you rent and energy, continuously, on volume that earns you nothing. The full height aisle you drive a forklift down in mobile racking is refrigerated. The half-empty drive-in lane is refrigerated. The gap sitting above your racking is refrigerated.

And the aisles are a bigger prize than they look. Conventional racking needs aisles wide enough for a forklift to turn in and lift, and in a cold store every one of those metres is chilled around the clock. With AutoCube, the shuttle travels inside the rack itself, so the wide forklift aisles largely disappear. The runways it moves along are a fraction of the width. You're refrigerating far less empty floor purely to move stock in and out.

So denser, better-utilised storage in a cold environment isn't only about fitting more in. It's about shrinking the refrigerated volume you carry per pallet stored. Reclaim the aisles, the dead lanes and the unused height, and you're not just gaining capacity, you're cutting the volume you pay to keep cold for every unit you hold.

With energy costs where they are, that line on the P&L rarely shrinks on its own. Storage design is one of the few levers that actually moves it.

Maximum capacity and maximum throughput usually pull in opposite directions. The right design is what lets you have both...
25/08/2026

Maximum capacity and maximum throughput usually pull in opposite directions. The right design is what lets you have both, in the same footprint.

A recent food and drink project needed exactly that. Serious storage density and fast, uninterrupted outbound picking, in a solution that met the operation as it runs today and left clear room to grow into. The easy answer would have been to put everything on standard pallet racking. It would also have compromised on both.

So we built it in layers. Live pallet racking on the bottom for picking, gravity feeding each pick face from the back so replenishment never interrupts the picker at the front. Above it, high-density shuttle storage holding the bulk, using the height and recovering the floor space that reach truck aisles would otherwise eat. The two aren't separate systems sitting side by side. They're one integrated structure, storage feeding pick. Conventional pallet racking handled the medium-volume lines, where direct access matters more than density.

And for the fastest-moving lines, the shuttle takes full pallets and they go straight out to the waiting wagon, no double handling in between.

Dense storage above, fast flow below, and the right storage method matched to each SKU type. Not the easiest system to install, but the one that fits how the operation actually works, with the capacity to keep fitting as it grows.

Most storage automation assumes a neat, standard-sized pallet. Uniform, square, predictable. And to be clear, we handle ...
20/08/2026

Most storage automation assumes a neat, standard-sized pallet. Uniform, square, predictable. And to be clear, we handle those all day long. Standard pallet automation is the backbone of what we do.

But plenty of industries don't deal only in neat or are anything but standard. Drums, IBCs, oversized and extra-large pallets. Cylindrical, awkward, heavy loads that don't sit obediently in a standard footprint. In chemicals especially, the non-standard load is the norm, not the exception.

And here's what tends to happen with those loads - people get told it can't be done. That automation only really works for standard pallets, and anything outside that is either impossible or not worth the effort.

It's not always true. It's usually just harder, and harder is exactly the kind of problem we've spent thirty years and more than ten thousand projects learning to solve.

Standard pallets, extra-large pallets, drums and IBCs. When the load doesn't fit the usual assumptions, the answer isn't to force it into a solution built for something else. It's to design and develop the solution around the load.

If your product doesn't fit the pallet-shaped mould most automation is built around, you're not alone, and you've probably been told the wrong thing about what's possible.

More and more companies won't stack their IBCs at all now. The products are too valuable, or too hazardous to risk it. I...
19/08/2026

More and more companies won't stack their IBCs at all now. The products are too valuable, or too hazardous to risk it.

It's an understandable call. Stacked IBCs sit unevenly, because no two are ever quite identical, and that puts the whole load on one corner of the container beneath until something punctures. When what's inside is costly or dangerous, "let's not stack" is a rational way to remove that risk.

But not stacking means IBCs spread out at ground level while the height above them goes to waste.

HSE guidance caps filled IBCs at two high anyway, so even the sites that do stack aren't gaining much. Either way, the building's full long before it's actually full.

Our Maxi Cube IBC racking gives you a third option: height and density without the risk. Each IBC is properly supported and independent, stacked four or five high and up to 6 deep depending on weight (and your forklift) - so you get the capacity without the instability and the risk that made stacking a bad idea in the first place.

Our explainer walks through the safety reasoning, the space numbers and the fire and pollution obligations in one place. A useful read if you've made the call not to stack and are feeling the cost of it.

Check it out now at https://thistlesystems.co.uk/ibc-storage-systems-explained/

18/08/2026

It starts with a single scan. From the second it's scanned into AutoCube®, our MAxIQ® warehouse orchestration software takes over. Every movement of that pallet, every position it occupies, every second it sits or shifts, is tracked and recorded. Nothing depends on someone remembering where they put it, or a stock check catching up with reality a day later.

And because MAxIQ® maintains a live digital twin of the store, you're not looking at where a pallet should be. You're looking at where it is, right now, mirrored exactly in software. Every pallet, every location, in real time.

It's not just about capacity and density in automated chemical warehousing.One of the features that gets most chemical c...
13/08/2026

It's not just about capacity and density in automated chemical warehousing.

One of the features that gets most chemical companies interested is the software's ability to know the precise location of every pallet and enforce the rules on placement and segregation. It stops segregation being a manual discipline that depends on someone remembering on a busy shift, and it protects you when an audit could ask you at any moment to prove exactly where a given batch has been sitting.

Because segregation in chemical storage isn't a filing preference. It's a legal and safety obligation, and it makes dense storage genuinely hard. You can't just pack product tight when incompatible substances have to be physically separated and certain goods need specific zones.

That's the part that keeps paying you back. Not once at installation, but every shift, every audit, every year the system runs. It won't put the wrong thing next to the wrong thing, because it isn't allowed to.

Compliance and density usually feel like opposing forces in this sector. They don't have to be, if the control layer is doing its job.

Thirty years in business and more than ten thousand projects delivered have taught us one unglamorous truth: the best st...
12/08/2026

Thirty years in business and more than ten thousand projects delivered have taught us one unglamorous truth: the best storage solution is the one that's still right in ten years.

It's easy to sell density. Cram more in, hit a headline number, walk away. The harder and more useful job is designing storage that still works when your volumes change, your product mix shifts, and the people running it aren't the people who signed it off.

That's why we talk about clients for life rather than projects delivered. A shuttle system, a control layer like MAxIQ, an ATEX-rated build, a pick tower. Whatever the solution, we view these as long term commitments, not transactions. The engineering has to hold up long after the invoice is paid.

Space is finite. Good design is what makes it go further, for longer. That's the whole job, really.

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2 Deerdykes Court
Cumbernauld
G689FL

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Tuesday 8:30am - 5pm
Wednesday 8:30am - 5pm
Thursday 8:30am - 5pm
Friday 8:30am - 5pm

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