Stolen bakery equipment tracked to Shropshire recycling site
Stolen bakery equipment has been tracked to a recycling centre in Shropshire.
Bakery equipment company Bakers Basco says it has won a major victory in the fight against criminals who steal its bread baskets and dollies by using GPS-equipped decoys to track the missing equipment.
Bakers Basco has been increasing the use of GPS tracking chips in its equipment over the past two years, with regular updates, and has already won a number of court cases using evidence gathered in this way.
Usually, the tracking devices are randomly placed on equipment. But in the latest case, after reports of equipment being stolen from various customers in and around Birmingham, the company went one stage further and placed some of its special tracker units at specific locations where thefts had already occurred.
On two separate occasions, the company’s equipment was removed without permission, and was then tracked via a recycling unit in the Midlands, before ending up at a plastics recycler in Shropshire.
Bakers Basco called in the police and attended the Shropshire site with police, where they discovered a substantial amount of equipment, worth thousands of pounds. Further visits recovered yet more equipment in Birmingham.
The owner of the Shropshire plastics recycling site was served with appropriate documentation and a charge for the location and recovery of the equipment.
After failing to respond, matters were escalated and culminated in a county court judgment for £6,438.45, representing the original claimed damages plus interest and court costs.
Bakers Basco’s team is now working with different police forces to pursue the various people involved in stealing the company’s property through the courts.
Steve Millward, general manager at Bakers Basco, said: “Usually, when our equipment go missing, it’s because someone, like a small baker or retailer, has ‘borrowed’ it without permission. In this case, the defendants were stealing our equipment and recycling them for the value of the raw materials.
“Our equipment is designed for one sole purpose and that is to transport bread safely, cost-effectively and in an environmentally-friendly way. When people steal it like this, the bakeries that pay to license our equipment, the retailers that sell their loaves and the shoppers who rely on them for their daily bread all end up paying extra for the actions of a small number of greedy criminals.”
Bakers Basco was set up to manage and license a pool of bread baskets and dollies for the use of bakers. Its equipment is clearly marked as the company’s property. However, every year, several million pounds worth of its equipment, meant purely for the safe transport of bakery products is taken.
Often, equipment is converted for other purposes, which damages it or makes it unusable for safely transporting bread. As a result, bakers, shops and consumers all end up paying more than they need to.
Mr Millward said: “We will be deploying more high-tech crime fighting equipment in the future. From now on, anyone thinking about stealing or destroying our property in the future needs to understand that we will track them down, we will call in the police and we will pursue them through the courts.”
