‘First of its kind’: New $100 million cold storage facility opens at Port Saint John

Americold’s new cold-storage facility at Port Saint John is pictured. (Avery MacRae/CTV News Atlantic)

A little over a year after the ground was first broken on the building, Americold’s new import-export hub at Port Saint John is ready to stock its shelves.

Americold Realty Trust, which describes itself as a global leader in temperature-controlled logistics, expects goods to be flowing in and out of their new harbourfront warehouse by early July.

Americold CEO Rob Chambers says the new facility is a first of its kind globally to combine their cold storage capabilities with world-class partners such as DP World and Canadian Pacific Kansas City Railway.

“DP World is a great terminal operator there, CPKC has the rail line there with refrigerated boxcars, what was missing was temperature controlled real estate or infrastructure right on the port,” says Chambers.

“This will allow product to come directly into Canada and be distributed across the country, or it opens up trade lanes for folks who want to export their product that was manufactured in Canada to Europe, Australia, South America and other places. It’s a solution that should be faster, it should be cheaper, it should be greener than anything else that was available previously.”

Chambers says the over 200,000-square-foot facility will mainly support various food manufacturers and grocery retailers. As for specific examples, the CEO expects things like frozen potato products and seafood will be among the most trafficked items in and out of the building.

The $100 million facility brings with it 100 new jobs to the region.

Port Saint John president and CEO Craig Bell Estabrooks says the work getting the cold storage hub opened on the waterfront was much longer than the one year it took to build the warehouse, located just down from the Saint John-Digby ferry terminal.

He says the facility is another piece of the growing global gateway that is the Saint John Harbour.

“It’s a really tremendous value added,” Bell Estabrooks says, adding the already easily selling points of having DP World as the port’s terminal operator, as well as the rail partnerships the port has built.

Bell Estabrooks hopes the storage facility will attract new container lines to Port Saint John.

“This is not a short-term play, but in the future years we want to see container services that maybe don’t call here today look at this opportunity to bring in perishables,” says Estabrooks. “We really view it as a long-term play.”

As for the next big project on the port’s agenda, Bell Estabrooks says they have put in a trade diversification corridors fund application to the federal government on a number of projects.

That includes upgrades to the ports over 5,000-square-feet of existing warehouses on site, as well as the widening and deepening of the channel to allow for bigger vessels to dock at the port property.

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