Arcadia Cold, a third-party services provider headquartered in Austin, Texas, plans to develop a network of cold storage facilities in the United States.
The cold chain firm recently partnered with Saxum Real Estate, a vertically integrated, real estate investment and development company, to develop their greenfield locations, starting with Hazleton, Pa., Atlanta, Ga., and Fort Worth, Texas, which are expected to commence operations by mid-2023, Arcadia said.
Saxum holds more than $1 billion in cold storage investments and has a mission to grow its real estate portfolio to include more than 10 million square feet of cold storage assets, according to the companies. Arcadia focuses on providing its handling, storage, distribution, and value-added services to the food industry.
“We are excited to execute the build-out and operational startup of a fast-paced and modernized cold storage development platform that is uniquely designed to service a wide variety of customers across the CPG, protein, produce, retail, and foodservice end markets,” said Chris Hughes, president and CEO of Arcadia Cold.
“Arcadia will raise the bar and bring a new level of customer-centric, operational (support) and related service offerings to an industry that is simply looking for renewed focus and attention to their needs.”
The company maintains that it plans to add “much-needed, modern, highly efficient, and well-run” capacity to the U.S. food supply chain infrastructure, which it asserts “is plagued by older, less energy-efficient, and more labor-intensive cold storage assets.”
“U.S. storage warehouse occupancies are at an all-time high, and continued growth in food distribution demand across all end-user groups—due to greater online adoption by consumers and continued expansion of fresh and frozen product categories—will only fuel the need for more national pallet space,” Arcadia said.
Arcadia expects to add approximately 200,000 pallet positions of refrigerated and frozen capacity to the existing U.S. cold storage market by 2024.
