China's soaring seafood growth sparks massive cold store investment

Preferred Freezer Services quadruples presence in Asia, highlighting the need for improved logistics for frozen seafood in the region.

Jeanine Stewart

Preferred Freezer Services (PFS), one of the world’s largest public temperature-controlled warehouses, is expanding its presence in Asia by adding three facilities in China.

The move quadruples PFS's presence in Asia. It launched a facility in Vietnam in 2009, which was at the time the largest and most advanced in the country, according to the Shanghai Institute of Mechanical and Electrical Engineering. The New Jersey-based company also has 26 facilities throughout the United States.

Within the last month, the $200 million (€154.6 million) company opened its first warehouse in Shanghai’s Lingang Park. It is a semi-automated, 25,000-square-meter temperature-controlled warehouse with a capacity of 40,000 metric tons.

The company’s second facility is scheduled to open in the first quarter of 2012 in Waigaoqiao, and its third facility is under construction in Tianjin. Both will have 30,000 metric tons of storage space.

“Everything about these facilities is the same as what we have here in the U.S.,” Marketing Coordinator Gail Hannagan told IntraFish. “So we’re duplicating everything we have here to China to better serve their industry in cold storage.”

The move is part of a greater effort to meet the needs of a growing Chinese middle class, and with that, a need for more refrigeration facilities to keep seafood and other proteins stored safely.

"This is our break into China, so this will be our third of many actually," Hannagan said. "We are planning more facilities in China because of the growth rate of production in the cold chain industry."

PFS reports that China’s growth consumption rate is expected to increase to over $4 trillion (€3.1 trillion) by 2020, according to research by Homi Kharas and Geoffrey Gertz from the Wolfensohn Center for Development.

The company’s new Lingang facility celebrated its grand opening in late November with more than 200 attendees, made up of local business leaders from the Shanghai Lingang Administration Committee, Lingang Economic Development Group, Yangshan Customs and Inspection and Quarantine. Customers, vendors and business partners also attended.

PFS and YiDA Group, a developer of commercial parks and residential communities in China, have jointly invested in the development of China’s cold chain and logistics industry.