Company says it is importing extra supplies in the event that ports grind to a halt

Unilever is stockpiling Magnum ice-cream in the UK to ensure supplies do not run low if there is a no-deal Brexit.



Alan Jope, Unilever’s chief executive, said the company had taken the decision to import extra supplies of the ice-cream, which is produced in mainland Europe, in case the ports grind to a halt.

Jope also gave the example of its deodorant brands, which are made in Leeds and include Sure, Lynx and Dove, for which extra stock is being held on the other side of the Channel.

The consumer goods giant owns more than 400 brands, including Persil, Cif and Cornetto, and other products are likely to be affected by the emergency measures, depending on where they are made.

Brands produced in the UK include Ben & Jerry’s ice-cream and Marmite but Magnums, for example, are made in factories in Italy and Germany.

“We have built inventory on either side of the Channel,” Jope said. “It’s weeks of inventory – not months or days.

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“If I was in the designer handbag business then I might have built further [inventory] cover but we’re not, we are in fast-moving consumer goods and one of the things we have learned is, when you build inventory, it can end up being the wrong mix of product.”

Jope said the overall cost involved in storing the additional stock, along with changing the artwork on products to ensure they still complied with relevant regulations, was not material to the company, which has annual sales of €51bn (£44.6bn).



Unilever has also been building up stocks of the materials used to make and package products in the UK, including aluminium, plastics and propellants. The company is hiring a team of customs experts as part of its Brexit planning.

In his first press conference since succeeding Paul Polman as chief executive, Jope said the company was preparing for a multitude of scenarios of which a hard Brexit was the most difficult to manage.



He said the impact on the company’s prices would depend on the tariff regime: “We desperately hope that we don’t end up in a tariff-laden environment.”

Unilever is the latest company to reveal it is stockpiling products before the Brexit deadline. All major retailers, including Tesco and Marks & Spencer, are stockpiling packet and tinned foods, although they have warned it is not possible to build up supplies of fresh produce.

Drugmakers were told by the UK government last summer to stockpile six weeks’ worth of extra medicines, prompting AstraZeneca to boost its supplies in UK warehouses to four and a half months.

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Major carmakers are stockpiling parts but Jaguar Land Rover has warned that it can only amass enough parts to cope with days of disruption, rather than weeks. Other manufacturers including BMW have echoed those concerns.

Jürgen Maier, the UK chief executive of Siemens, said it had increased its holdings of the “critical” components used, for example, to keep the railways and food production lines running.

“We have parts that are very frequent in terms of when our customers might need them … food manufacturing or it might be parts that are required to service and keep our railways going,” he explained. “We have looked at that profile and increased our stocks of some of those critical parts as part of our risk mitigation activities.”