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You have to finish warm to enter the largest warehouse for automated cold storage in the UK, where the pallets filled with chips and pizza speed along the rails, and the robots raise them in a 15 -deck dice that is longer and wider than football fields. Wear a thick coat, hat and gloves for minus 23c temperature and forget the pen: the ink will freeze.
It’s like walking in the freezing section of the kitchen refrigerator, except that this box is huge and oxygen is reduced to limit the risk of fire. Pallets sit six deep in high columns of steel brackets, loaded and retrieved by machines that people oversee in a warm control room nearby. As I look at the heights, I record the notes using a borrowed pen.
This cold cube in Corby, the former town of Steel in Northamptonshire, is owned by Newcold, a Dutch company that has been stored and delivered frozen foods for manufacturers such as McCain Foods, Unilever and British Sladoled Fronner Groups. The pallets are brought to the refrigerators and sent to the supermarkets on request: 4,000 pallets pass and exit every day.
It is big even for Newcold, which operates at 22 content globally: Corby is the second largest after a $ 300 million store in Indiana, which opened in 2023. But it is the tip of the iceberg of the cold chain. Other cubes rose in a “logistical triangle” in Midlands, because global companies like Newcold Linege are transformed by the US industry.
The closest thing to the British rival Newcold has been magnled, which has opened an automated cold storage this month in the amount of £ 130m near Grantham in Lincolnshire with 101,000 palettes, compared to 151,000 in Corby. He is headquartered in Chesterfield, but owned by Sadel Group, Stephen’s family office, based in Luxembourg, a British asset programmer.
The industry was very fragmented, with many family warehouse operators in which pallets are transported on vilice lifting trucks. This gives way to automated cubes that are expensive to build, but effective to start: 160 people work in Corby, a third of the number that needs a traditional manual trade.
Cubes occupy smaller la The industry in the UK spent 1.2 billion pounds last year on energy, and a third of its facilities are more than 25 years old, according to the Federation of the Cold Chain. Many facilities must be upgraded, and it is more difficult to install than to build again.
Newcold is part of this evolution. He was founded in the Netherlands in 2012, Bram Hage, a former footballer, with the support of US private capital company Westport Capital Partners. The Netherlands has a large logistical industry and “produces a huge amount of fries,” he notes. This has taken this expertise in warehouse and frozen vegetables around the world.
Together with Corby, Newcold has a large facility in Wakefield, West Yorkshire, which will serve north of England (Lineage, which go public In the United States last year, he also has twins of the British “Superhubs” in the north and south). Hage says the UK is an attractive market because its supermarkets have sophisticated supply chains and need food companies to fit smoothly.
But there is an alarming concentration of a cold chain. The UK in 2023 introduced the £ 32 billion pounds cooled and frozen foods, which is almost three times more than the amount. Border friction, since Brexit means that it needs larger interpreters to ensure the continuity of food supply. Corby is part of a critical infrastructure in the UK.
More this infrastructure becomes foreign owned by the economy of the scale. Newcold’s size allows for vertically integrated: his facilities work on his own software and produce his own steel racks, helping him to build quickly. “We follow our customers all over the world,” Hage says.
It is difficult for smaller operators to compete: Newcold is the fourth largest cold chain company at global capacity, while magnled 18th. The son of Stephen Lawrence Andrew supervised Sadela and says that the latter “in that long -term”. Cold storage now contains 60 percent of Sadel’s assets and plans to expand to continental Europe.
Industry that has been progressing glacially for decades. In Corby, the trucks turn into the bays sealed with airbags to stop the heat by entering while unloaded and filled. Paletes intended for supermarkets are constantly expelled in warehouses. The cold chain must continue to rotate.
John.gapper@ft.com
