In this interview with Corey Rosenbusch, president & CEO of the Global Cold Chain Alliance, we discuss the current cold storage and refrigerated warehousing market, its trends, challenges and future opportunities.
By Dan Orehov
What are your thoughts on the current climate of temperature-controlled warehousing and logistics?
The market is very large and growing and if I were to summarize the current conditions I would say that the demand for storage capacity has exceeded the capacity available. Just about every market that I go to is quite full and we currently get more calls for space from customers than ever before. From this standpoint, it’s been really great for the market but it has also presented our customers with some challenges, especially smaller operators that are looking to enter a market.
How would you characterize the major players’ strategy of success that has placed them in the Top 25 largest temperature-controlled warehousing and logistics providers in the world?
There is a lot of diversity on that particular Top 25 list, compiled by the IARW. If you start at the top, the first five largest companies are now owned by private equity firm and one can notice a trend of consolidation in the industry in the past decade. That strategy has been to go out and find good-quality operating companies that may not have succession plans or looking to be part of a larger growth strategy and enroll those up. It’s been a very successful strategy for them, as they managed to acquire some very good operating companies with a wide diversity of locations and position them with a lot of CPG brands. If you look at Agro Merchants for example, they have heavily invested in Europe, but they also have operations in Brazil and Australia. While each of them may have a slightly different business model, I think the word diversity best describes that top 25 list of companies. It’s also a very dynamic segment.
Which are some of the most commonly used products to be stored in such facilities?
We’ve recently conducted a survey in this regard, just to try and get a better sense of the market and of the products stored in 3PL facilities, in order to best meet the needs of the companies which are active on this segment. As a preview of this survey, what I can say is that among the most stored food categories there are prepared meals, which is probably the largest one, followed closely by proteins, dairy and ice cream occupy a lot of this market as well.
You can read the entire article in the May-June print issue of Frozen Food Europe
