NewCold Advanced Cold Logistics has won a 10-year contract from McCain Foods Australia to provide cold storage services at a facility now being built in the Melbourne suburb of Truganina. The public refrigerated warehouse (PRW), which will also store products from other clients including Fonterra Australia, the world’s largest dairy exporter, is expected begin receiving goods this summer and have an official grand opening in the autumn.
“The storage and handling of McCain’s frozen products in the new automated facility will give us a more stable temperature regime and highly accurate stock control,” said McCain Foods ANZ Supply Chain Director Taso Kourou.
The NewCold Advanced Cold Storage warehouse now under construction in the Melbourne suburbs will have capacity for more than 102,000 pallets.“Our Melbourne operation will play a critical role in driving NewCold’s expansion throughout Australia and Asia–Pacific,” said Bram Hage, founder and executive vice president of Breda, Holland-headquartered NewCold Advanced Cold Logistics, which currently runs refrigerated warehouses in the United Kingdom, France, Germany and Poland.
The first of two major coldstores to be built in the Melbourne area of the southeast Australia state of Victoria, will offer:
- A 176 x 100 meter footprint featuring a fully automated, 34 meter high structure with eight double satellite stacker cranes.
- Total storage capacity of 102,816 Australian CHEP pallets.
- Storage area and loading docks at -23°C.
- FEFO handling with capacity of more than 10,000 pallets per day.
- A 900-pallet shipment buffer zone to facilitate minimal waiting time for trucks before loading.
- 19 docks, of which two are allocated for automatic truck unloading.
In recent years Truganina has become an increasingly important storage and distribution center for food, beverages and other retail products. Coles Supermarkets built a 70,000-square-meter facility there in 2012. Other major retailers with distribution warehouses on the scene include Woolworths and Kmart Australia.
NewCold Enters US Market
Meanwhile in the United States, NewCold and the Fisher Construction Group have broken ground to build a high-bay, automated storage and retrieval system (ASRS) warehouse near the Port of Tacoma and Interstate Highway 5.
An artist’s impression of the NewCold refrigerated warehouse to be built near the Port of Tacoma. Trident Seafoods, a major processor of fish harvested from Alaskan waters, will be among the frozen food companies utilizing the 25 million cubic foot facility.
Advanced software systems will control equipment and direct operators at the Washington site, where products will be maintained at sub-zero temperatures.
The multi-customer facility is designed to enable food producers, among them Seattle-headquartered Trident Seafoods, to optimize cold chain management with increased agility and responsiveness around the clock. It will be one of the largest refrigerated warehouses in the nation, with storage capacity of over 25 million cubic feet.
“With this ground-breaking, NewCold brings to Tacoma, the Pacific Northwest and North America 16 years of leadership in automated cold storage development and operations,” said David Richardson, president and chief executive officer of NewCold. “Although our roots are in Europe, our heart is with global food producers wherever we can bring value.”
“We are excited to partner with NewCold on this facility, their first in North America,” said Dan Powers, president and ceo of Fisher Construction Group. “The unique method used to build this warehouse, and the technologies incorporated within facility are the way of the future, and we’re pleased to team with them and their storage partners to make it a reality.”
Leading edge technologies to be utilized, in addition to the automated pallet retrieval systems, include the building itself, which will be supported by the structure of the storage racks that hold the pallets of products. A low-oxygen environment will greatly reduce the risk of fire from the inside, and only half the energy typically consumed by conventional cold stores will be required to keep products optimally frozen.
Solid Financial Backing
The main shareholder of NewCold Advanced Cold Logistics is Westport Capital Partners LLC, an American private equity firm headquartered in Wilton, Connecticut, with more than $1.8 billion in assets under management. An important part of its platform investment strategy includes providing fully integrated cold storage logistics services to premier multinational frozen food producers across the $233 billion global frozen food market. The business plan calls for developing one or two sites per year under the NewCold banner. This includes expanding European operations in the West Flanders region of Belgium, the Rennes area of northwest France, and at a location near Rome, Italy.
