You must wrap up warm to enter the largest automated cold storage warehouse in the UK, where pallets loaded with chips and pizzas speed along rails and are lifted by robots into a 15-deck storage cube that is longer and wider than a football field. Wear a thick coat, hat and gloves for the minus 23C temperature, and forget a pen: the ink will freeze.
It is like walking into the freezer compartment of a kitchen fridge, except that this box is enormous and the oxygen is reduced to limit the risk of fires. The pallets sit six-deep within tall columns of steel racks, loaded and retrieved by machines that are monitored by humans in a warm control room nearby. As I gaze up into the heights, I take notes using a borrowed pencil.
This cold cube in Corby, the former steelmaking town in Northamptonshire, is owned by NewCold, a Dutch company that has stored and delivered frozen food for producers such as McCain Foods, Unilever and the UK-based ice cream group Froneri. Pallets are brought in refrigerated trucks and sent to supermarkets on demand: 4,000 pallets pass in and out each day.
It is big even for NewCold, which operates 22 facilities globally: Corby is its second biggest after a $300mn store in Indiana, which opened in 2023. But it is the tip of a cold chain iceberg. Other cubes have risen in the Midlands “logistics triangle” as global companies such as NewCold and Lineage of the US transform the industry.
The nearest thing to a UK rival to NewCold is Magnavale, which this month opened a £130mn automated cold storage facility near Grantham in Lincolnshire with 101,000 pallet spaces, compared with 151,000 at Corby. It is based in Chesterfield but owned by Sadel Group, the Luxembourg-based family office of Stephen Lawrence, a British property developer.
The industry has been highly fragmented, with many family-owned operators of warehouses in which pallets are transported on fork lift trucks. These are giving way to automated cubes that are costly to build but efficient to run: 160 people work in Corby, a third of the number that a traditional manual store would need.
Cubes occupy less land and use less electricity, which is vital as energy prices and environmental standards rise. The UK industry spent £1.2bn last year on energy and a third of its facilities are more than 25 years old, according to the Cold Chain Federation. Many facilities must be upgraded, and it is harder to retrofit than build anew.
NewCold is part of this evolution. It was founded in the Netherlands in 2012 by Bram Hage, a former football player, with backing from the US private equity firm Westport Capital Partners. The Netherlands has a large logistics industry and “produces a huge amount of french fries”, he notes. It has taken this expertise in storage and frozen vegetables worldwide.
Along with Corby, NewCold has a large facility in Wakefield, West Yorkshire, to serve the north of England (Lineage, which went public in the US last year, also has twin 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 in smoothly.
But there is an alarming side to cold chain concentration. The UK imported £32bn of chilled and frozen food in 2023, nearly three times the amount that it exported. Border frictions since Brexit mean that it needs bigger buffers to ensure the continuity of food supplies. Corby is part of the UK’s critical infrastructure.
More of this infrastructure is becoming foreign owned because of economies of scale. NewCold’s size allows it to be vertically integrated: its facilities run on its own software and it fabricates its own steel racks, helping it to build rapidly. “We follow our customers all over the world,” Hage says.
It is tough for smaller operators to compete: NewCold is the fourth largest cold chain company by global capacity, while Magnavale ranks 18th. Stephen Lawrence’s son Andrew oversees Magnavale for Sadel, and says the latter is “in this for the long term”. Cold storage now comprises 60 per cent of Sadel’s assets and it is planning to expand into continental Europe.
An industry that advanced glacially for decades is picking up speed. At Corby, trucks reverse into bays sealed with air bags to stop warmth entering as they are unloaded and filled. Pallets destined for supermarkets are driven out constantly to depots. The cold chain has to keep turning.
john.gapper@ft.com