Global cold-chain logistics company, NewCold, has officially opened its $200 million freezer expansion, adding 80,000 pallet positions to Australia’s largest automated cold-storage operations – taking the facility to 180,000 pallet positions.
Founder and CEO, Bram Hage, travelled from the Netherlands for the opening, marking the company’s latest investment in Australia since entering the market in 2017.
NewCold’s two cold-storage facilities at Truganina now have a combined capacity of 405,000 pallet positions across frozen, chilled and ambient storage.
Standing 40 metres high and operating at minus 23 degrees Celsius, the 10,453 square metre freezer is one of the world’s largest automated high-bay cold-storage facilities and stores food for major manufacturers including McCain, Peters and Patties.
The expansion comes as changing work and eating habits drive demand for convenient food, with CSIRO forecasting Australian consumption of prepared and frozen packaged meals to grow to $3.7 billion by 2030.
Hage said the additional capacity reflects the growth NewCold is seeing from food manufacturers as consumer demand for frozen and convenient food increases.
The scale of demand for frozen food is also evident around major events. Official match-day sales at last year’s AFL Grand Final included 24,000 serves of hot chips and 12,000 pies, highlighting the storage and logistics required to meet demand.
According to Hage, the company has become a critical link between food manufacturers, supermarkets and the millions of Australians they feed every day.
“When we came to Australia in 2017, we saw an opportunity to bring a very different approach to cold storage. We started here with McCain and Peters and we’ve grown alongside our customers ever since,” he said.
“What we’ve built together here has now been replicated in other markets around the world.
“Nine years ago, there were people who questioned whether Australia needed the capacity we were building. Today, we have more than 400,000 pallet positions across this precinct and we’re continuing to invest. That says a lot about how the market and our customers have grown.”
Australia was the start of NewCold’s global relationship with McCain, which has since become its largest customer worldwide.
Ross Fallon, regional VP supply chain APACSA at McCain, said the additional capacity will ensure it can keep up with the demand for frozen foods.
“Australians are buying more frozen food, from fries and ready-made meals to pizza, vegetables and snacks and that means more product needs to be stored and moved through the cold chain. The additional capacity and technology allows us to scale with that demand without compromising reliability, efficiency or control,” he explained.
“The automation and connectivity to our factories gives us highly accurate stock control, consistent temperature management and less manual handling of our products.”
NewCold is at the forefront of Australia’s $8 billion cold-chain logistics sector, having developed an entire intelligent system to run its warehouses, bringing a level of automation not previously seen in the sector.
The warehouse functions like a highly automated airport for food where every pallet is digitally checked in on arrival, scanned, assigned a destination and moved through the high-bay by automated stacker cranes, shuttles and conveyors.
Overnight, it uses order data and predictive analytics to reshuffle pallets, so the stock needed first the following day is already in position for retrieval at its 21 loading docks.
Every pallet must pass a series of automated checks before entering the warehouse. If it's too heavy, too tall or even slightly overhanging, the system rejects it, reducing the risk of damage, disruption to the automated system and delays further down the supply chain.
“People often think automation is just about speed but it’s also about protecting the product,” said Hage.
“Once a pallet enters the high-bay, the system does almost everything itself, there’s very little human intervention. The less it's handled, the safer the food, the lower the risk of damage and the more efficient the whole process becomes.”
NewCold’s Melbourne base is also the national distribution point for Peters, which helped establish the company in Australia.
“For a business supplying frozen products across Australia, maintaining temperature and having product where it needs to be, when it needs to be there, is critical. The additional capacity gives us greater ability to support growing demand,” said Ms Emma-Jane Collins, CEO of Peters Ice Cream.
“The operation is monitored from a control room where staff can see the movement and location of stock across the warehouse on banks of screens. The 40-metre-high freezer is designed to store pallets vertically rather than spreading refrigeration across the site.
“Cold storage is incredibly energy intensive. By going higher and storing more product within a smaller refrigerated footprint, we can use around 50 per cent less energy/power than a conventional cold store.”
NewCold currently commissions five to seven new frozen warehouses annually. The company plans to be carbon neutral by 2040.
