St Francis Group, a property development and investment group, and its joint venture partner ALMCOR have officially broken ground on a new 113,000 sq ft robot led HQ/warehouse for fast growing Chesterfield-based pharmacy chain Peak Pharmacy at its Horizon 29 industrial development site at Bolsover, North Derbyshire.
Works on the £20m ultra-modern headquarters and facility commenced at the start of June and are accelerating rapidly. The new facility will use state of the art robotics and automated systems to support staff handling over 400,000 medicines and other prescribed items every month, equating to 20,000 a day, more than 40 every minute.
The new Pharmacy Service Centre will handle prescriptions and dispatch medicines for the firm’s 150 community pharmacies across England. Prescriptions will be assembled for individual patients, then either delivered to local pharmacies for collection the next day, or direct to patients’ homes.
The new hub is expected to take nine months to build and due to open in April next year. It will house up to 100 staff, with the potential to grow into a 24-hour operation in future.
MCS Construction has been appointed as the main building contractor. St Francis Group also acknowledges the support of the Northeast Derbyshire District Council, Bolsover District Council, Derbyshire County Council and the D2N2 LEP in bringing this development forward.
Speaking about the start on site Gareth Williams, development director at St Francis Group, said: “We are absolutely delighted to have formally marked the start of works onsite and to be building this fantastic new facility for fast-growing customer Peak Pharmacy with the team onsite already having made significant progress.
“This new facility serves as the first unit to be built at Horizon 29, welcoming our first occupier. Since we commenced the extensive remediation of the site interest in the scheme has been extensive and the recent sale by the JV of 80 acres of land to BentallGreenOak for the speculative development of 1.2 million sq ft of warehouse and logistics space speaks to that.
“We look forward to working with the team at Peak Pharmacy and delivering a first-class facility next year.”
Joe Cattee, Managing Director of Peak Pharmacy, said: “These are ambitious plans for our company, staff and customers – in the face of a rapidly changing pharmacy landscape.
“This new facility will be truly transformational for us. We’re investing now to future-proof our business, so that we can continue to provide great local customer service which means so much to us.
“We are very pleased to be working with St Francis and ALMCOR and the full project team and look forward to seeing the development rise out of the ground as it happens.”
