New cold storage unit at the Port of Gdansk

22.01.2016

Just a few days ago, on 15 January 2016, the newest storage facility at the Port of Gdansk, a cold storage unit belonging to the company PAGO, obtained a certificate of occupancy.

A year ago, the Port of Gdansk announced a public tender procedure for the lease of a four-hectare area located near the deepwater container terminal (DCT). The tender was won by a Polish company specialising in the field of comprehensive logistics of frozen products, PAGO, which constructed the cold storage unit at the Port of Gdansk within just a few months, thus increasing its total storage area for frozen products to a capacity of 170,000 pallets.

The newly built cold storage unit is as yet the largest facility of this type owned by PAGO; it has three storage chambers with space for approximately 36,000 pallets. It was designed to enable the handling of all kinds of commodities which require sub-zero temperatures, including fruit, vegetables and dairy products. It is also possible to store and freeze fresh meat there.

The location of the facility is no accident, as the DCT is situated just a few hundred metres from the cold storage unit. In logistics terms, this provides exporters of frozen goods with a very wide range of possibilities for quickly and securely transporting products in containers to their recipients, and makes transport operations independent of the road conditions. The location is equally attractive to importers of frozen foods. The company also anticipates cooperation with local producers, operating solely on the domestic market.

The cold storage unit is a state-of-the-art facility - during its construction the latest energy-saving solutions and environmentally friendly warehouse cooling systems were used. The facility was also equipped with modern cutting-edge technology solutions, such as professional software developed specifically for PAGO, which monitors and supports warehouse operations. A specialist cold storage unit control system based on the use of mobile radio terminals also operates there, making it possible to identify the position where an item is stored to the nearest pallet and the nearest box. Inside the cold storage unit, there are mobile high-storage racks enabling free access to every pallet.

This is not the first facility of this type built by this investor. The company owns similar sites near Warsaw, Poznan, and Katowice, and also in northern Poland, just a few tens of kilometres from Gdansk - in Lebork. However, the new facility built at the Port of Gdansk is the largest of all these.

The Port of Gdansk and its immediate vicinity have been readily selected as a location for cooled warehouses, especially recently. This can be attributed not only to the growing worldwide interest in Polish food products, but also to the excellent transport connections with trunk roads and the A1 motorway, enabling optimal commodity distribution, particularly in the FMCG sector, and making it possible to transport this type of goods quickly from the port into and across the country and vice versa.