The food service industry runs on tight margins of time. Chefs expect fresh produce delivered on schedule every morning, which means the businesses that supply them cannot afford delays.
Albion Fine Foods supplies chefs and the catering trade across London and the South East, seven days a week, which puts a large delivery fleet on the roads and a busy warehouse team at work every day. In an operation moving at that pace, making sure people arrive at work and go home in the same condition matters to everyone. To support that, Albion Fine Foods has adopted fingerprint drug testing across its operations.
For Albion Fine Foods, the move from urine drug testing to fingerprint drug testing has helped:
- Simplify the switch, with adoption completed quickly and with little disruption.
- Give the team expert training and support they could rely on from day one.
- Make testing cleaner and less intrusive for the people being tested.
- Reinforce a shared safety culture across the whole business.
About Albion Fine Foods
Albion Fine Foods is a food service distributor supplying chefs and the catering trade across London and the South East. Operating seven days a week from its distribution facility at Crossways Commercial Park in Dartford, the company makes up to 1,400 deliveries a day to restaurants, pubs, cafes, and other hospitality businesses. Its mission is straightforward: great service, great produce, and less hassle.
That scale depends on a large fleet of vehicles and the drivers who run them.
Why Drug Testing Matters at Albion Fine Foods
For Lee Deeble, Health, Safety & Facilities Manager, workplace drug testing is about protecting people. The principle behind the programme is simple: everyone should arrive at work and return home in the same condition. With drivers on the road, and vehicles and equipment in use across the site every day, ensuring staff are fit for duty is essential to keeping colleagues and the public safe.
Commitment to that principle starts from the top of the business. Everybody, from the managing director downwards, is trained with the same safety-first mindset, which gives the health and safety team the tools and the backing to run testing properly.
Albion Fine Foods previously used urine drug testing. While it did the job, the method came with practical drawbacks. Urine testing can feel intrusive and offers little privacy for the person being tested, which can make an already sensitive process more uncomfortable than it needs to be. For a busy distribution operation, the company wanted a cleaner, quicker way to test its workforce without losing any rigour.
The Solution: Fingerprint Drug Testing
Albion Fine Foods adopted the Intelligent Fingerprinting Drug Screening System to screen its workforce. The system collects a fingerprint sweat sample and delivers an on-site screening result in under ten minutes, with no bodily fluids to collect or handle. If a screening result is non-negative, the team can send a sample to a UKAS-accredited laboratory for confirmatory analysis.
For Lee and his team, the appeal was a testing method that is quick, clean, and non-invasive. The process is simple to run: the tester completes the paperwork, the individual presses their fingertips onto the collection cartridge, and the tester inserts the cartridge into the reader, which analyses the sample. Once the tester has collected the sample, the system does the rest.
Albion runs testing on a random basis, with four or five names drawn at random, and also tests following any incident involving one of its vehicles.
A Simple Switch and Expert Training
The move to fingerprint drug testing was quick and uncomplicated. What stood out for Albion Fine Foods was the support that came with it. When questions came up, the team had people at Intelligent Fingerprinting they could call for clear, correct advice.
Training was the part that made the biggest impression.
“The training was great. The people who came down to train us were really comfortable to work with. It was really simple, really clear, really concise, but still with that human touch. After doing it a couple of times, I was comfortable to do it myself.”
Lee Deeble, Health, Safety and Facilities Manager at Albion Fine Foods
Thanks to the training, staff were quickly confident running tests themselves, without depending on outside contractors or specialists.
A Cleaner, Simpler Approach to Workplace Drug Testing
Albion Fine Foods shows how changing testing methods can strengthen a safety programme without adding complexity. By moving from urine drug testing to fingerprint drug testing, the company has made testing cleaner and less intrusive.
If your organisation wants a quicker, cleaner way to run workplace drug testing, backed by expert training and support, fingerprint drug testing could help. To see how it works, book a demonstration of the Intelligent Fingerprinting Drug Screening System. Our team can walk you through how the system fits into your existing workplace drug testing policies and how it can support safer, more efficient testing across your organisation.
