What is a Cold Storage Warehouse?

Simply put, a cold storage warehouse is building or facility designed to maintain certain environmental conditions to keep temperature sensitive products safe. Outwardly, these warehouses look like any other typical warehouse but differ internally to meet their purpose.

Why Do We Need Cold Storage?

Cold storage and associated warehousing are nothing new. Since people have always needed to eat, we’ve been storing food at cold temperatures long before the convenience of home fridges and freezers were invented. The premise being that by keeping food products cold they last longer thus maintaining quality(and safety.

Over time, cold storage warehousing has graduated from Victorian-era ice houses to industrial scale processes that utilize sophisticated, high-tech facilities, often with high levels of automation.

As of 2018, the global frozen food market was valued at 260.8 billion dollars U.S. Then the COVID-19 pandemic hit.

The essential need to keep the nascent Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine at extreme sub-zero temperatures was a test to see just how robust the cold chain and supportive logistics services were.

With cold storage warehousing plunged into the spotlight, most of the concern was directed to how pharmacies and vaccination centres would cope with receiving and maintaining large volumes of vaccine at the required -70°C temperature.

Though that was a measure of extreme control, we can’t overlook the daily need fort chilled or frozen food, other pharmaceutical products and goods that need cold or chilled warehousing. The sheer scale of the cold chain is vast, in which temperature monitored warehousing forms an essential part.