TRI Center facility adds new level of cold to area

Arcadia Cold’s ribbon cutting for its new 255,460-square-foot cold-storage facility at Tahoe Reno Industrial Center was an auspicious grand opening that was several years ahead of the company’s expansion plans in the Reno-Sparks market.

The cold-storage facility was actually a speculative development that was being built by Ti Cold, a specialty cold-storage contractor headquartered at Fort Wayne, Indiana. Arcadia Cold’s financial partner, Saxum Real Estate of Summit, N.J., acquired the building near the end of 2022, significantly hastening Arcadia Cold’s expansion into western region markets.

“The building came to us opportunistically, and we were thrilled to have it kind of fall into our laps because it would have taken us a lot longer to enter the market,” said Chris Hughes, Arcadia Cold’s president and chief executive officer. Hughes co-founded the company headquartered in Atlanta in May 2021 alongside principals at Saxum.

“It’s a wonderfully designed building that has the same specifications as if we would have constructed it as a build-to-suit facility like we have done with our other cold-storage facilities,” Hughes added. “We didn’t plan on constructing a building in Northern Nevada this early in our original site rollout sequencing, although being in the Reno-Sparks area was always on our list as part of our site selection strategy.”

Arcadia Cold is a third-party logistics provider in the cold-storage industry that primarily supports perishable frozen and refrigerated foods. Its main customers are food manufacturers, grocery retailers and food service distributors, as well as fresh and frozen pet food suppliers. The company operates additional facilities in Phoenix, Atlanta, Hazelton, Pennsylvania, and Burleson, Texas. It has another facility under construction in Jacksonville, Florida, which is scheduled to be operational in April.

The facility at TRIC is designed to serve a variety of customers, Hughes noted. The building is divided into five separate storage chambers, any one of which can be chilled from negative-10 to 40 degrees Fahrenheit.

“That is quite a unique attribute,” Hughes said. “It provides us and our customers the flexibility to move and store a variety of products.”

With internal clear heights exceeding 50 feet, the building can accommodate 37,260 pallet positions due to the higher racking clearances that greatly increases internal storage space by allowing five to six tiers of pallet storage racking.

“You get a lot of density per square foot for pallet positions within the internal footprint,” Hughes said. “That kind of layout design also allows for a lot more labor productivity.”

The additional height does require specialized forklifts and reach trucks that can extend up to that sixth level of the facility to pick orders for customer fulfillment, Hughes noted. All forklift drivers and reach truck operators are required to undergo rigorous certification and training processes, he added.

“We have been very fortunate here in Reno to hire forklift and reach truck operators who are fully certified to handle that equipment,” he said. “Reno is one of those locations where there are a large number of e-commerce-related firms, and that’s another reason why we like this area. There are a lot of quality industrial warehouses in this region, and we are really bullish about this location. The customer pipeline we have already built is reflective of that; a lot of customers are really interested in coming out here.”

Although it’s still ramping up business, Arcadia Cold accepted its first inbound loads last week. The company has hired staffing to meet its current needs and expects to onboard additional personnel and warehouse operators as it takes on additional customers over time. At full capacity, Arcadia Cold expects to employ 75 direct and indirect employees at its Northern Nevada cold-storage facility.

“We have been training and testing systems for a solid 45 to 60 days in advance of receiving our first pallet,” Hughes said. “That pipeline is well primed. The management and startup teams have done an outstanding job. Wherever we put our flag in the ground has to have access to quality labor, and Reno has a good pool of labor. That is something we have to be mindful of in our site selection criteria.

“We like this area because it is positioned well next to favorable infrastructure in Interstate 80 that supports east-westbound traffic across the United States,” Hughes added. “We also have the capability to deliver products into Northern California, Salt Lake City, Boise or points in Oregon and the Pacific Northwest.”

Hughes also said that there’s increased need for modernized cold-storage facilities throughout the U.S. The average age of many existing facilities is greater than 40 years, he said, and product handling and energy usage requirements have changed greatly over that time.

“There’s a general need for newer facilities to meet the product handling requirements of 2023 and beyond,” he said. “We are putting brand-new high-quality assets into the market at a time where there are a lot of aging assets in the United States.”