The intricate skills needed for cold storage solutions

Cold storage is one of the most significant pillars of the food industry – an essential tool for stakeholders from farmers and producers to large scale food service wholesalers, as well as restaurants and cafes.

Without this cold storage infrastructure, these industry players have no means to store and bulk handle perishable food like fruits and vegetables – and as a result, the nation’s wider food ecosystem and infrastructure would grind to a dire halt.

It’s therefore crucial that those who are in charge of manufacturing them are competent, qualified and experienced in the trade. One company that fits this bill is Q Construction, an industry leader in Aotearoa for temperature-controlled construction, building some of the country’s largest and most advanced coldstores and food processing lines.

Working with companies like Bidfood, Lineage, Tegel, Ottogi and Leader Foods for several years, the company has amassed expertise in food processing lines, temperature-controlled facilities and the construction of hygiene sensitive environments. Tony Eastland, the managing director of Q Construction, says this experience is crucial to understand the intricacies of what’s needed from cold storage.

“When it comes to anything to do with temperature control, the smaller details matter a lot more when you construct the building,” says Tony. “It becomes even more complicated when there are different temperature zones, which each have their own specific technical requirements.

“For example, a freezer room obviously has a temperature of 0 to -30, while a chiller room is usually between 2 and 6°C – so different considerations are needed for both.

“If you were to build a 5,000 square metre warehouse, you'd probably put one site manager on it,” says Tony. “But if you were to build a 5,000 square metre temperature-controlled facility or distribution centre, you'd probably require additional management staff – simply because if there was just one, they would get burnt out doing it.”

He says that these kinds of facilities are often seen as ‘warehouses within warehouses’.

“Having a heavier staff presence is one of our fundamental approaches to building these facilities,” says Tony. “It’s not just a warehouse – it’s a warehouse with a secondary building inside it, and then it’s got an office, drystore, loading docks and more – and these all need to flow with the different temperature zones.”

This was definitely the case when it came to the construction of the large-format temperature-controlled distribution centre for Bidfood, one of the country’s largest foodservice wholesalers and distributors. Located in Hobsonville, completed in August 2019 and valued at $20+ million, needless to say it was important to get it right.

“Hobsonville was actually one of several projects we’ve delivered for Bidfood, so by that point we refined a number of the important techniques and quirks,” Tony says. “It’s small things like making sure high-use doors are fit for purpose. So it meant we wanted to make Hobsonville our best cold store, and I think we did that.”

He says a significant cut and removal of existing materials was required across the entire site, so the Q Construction team focused on achieving an efficient construction programme in consultation with the project’s architect and engineers. Due to comprehensive planning and valuable experience from Bidfood projects past, site activities worked well with each other.

The final product boasts a 1540 square metre coldstore, a 440 square metre chiller, a 1600 square metre dry store and more than 900 square metres of environmental load areas.

“Bidfood’s Auckland North Distribution Centre expanded the company’s capacity to deliver timely orders, especially to those customers north of the Waitematā Harbour. Up to 12 trucks at a time can be serviced at environmental load areas, and the centre provides a large dry store as well as temperature-controlled storage for more than 4300 pallets of product.

“Special-purpose facilities include a plant room, forklift recharge room and a large drive-through canopy,” says Tony. 

It’s this expertise that is of most value to clients, Tony says. “It’s always a collaboration between us and the clients to make sure that the client has the best result. Clients are often very educated in how they operate their building – but we have the know-how to construct the building to ensure that it has the longevity that they're after.

“So it’s all about this delicate balance and ensuring the collaboration is seamless.”

Learn more about Q Construction and its cold storage solutions.