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As King Willem-Alexander of the Netherlands unveiled Pallet #1 at NewCold’s $333 million facility in McDonough, he ushered in what company executives see as a new era in food storage in the United States.
Wrapped in plastic fittingly hued for the House of Orange-Nassau, the cargo would later join a tracked conveyance system and move without human effort to the upper reaches of the “high-bay” warehouse.
And all it took was one push of a button by the king to set this “symphony” into motion.
Just a decade ago, a warehouse with such extensive automation and so few workers would have been frowned upon in the United States, said Jonas Swarttouw, NewCold’s executive vice president for commercial in North America.
“I sometimes felt in the beginning, in 2015, I needed to defend ourselves when we would make $100 million-plus investments, because it was perceived that NewCold was killing jobs,” Mr. Swattouw said. “If we fast-forward to today, it recognized by people that, ‘Hey, NewCold actually brings a solution to keep providing services, to keep food flowing.”
Future demand seems nearly limitless, if the company’s projections are to be believed.
NewCold has three facilities in North America already but plans to add 25 more by 2030 as customers like Conagra Brands continue to join up. Conagra is the launch partner for a 280,000-square-foot McDonough facility that boasts 85,000 pallet positions — the same capacity as a conventional warehouse four times its size. The company promises 170 jobs at full capacity on the site.
“We think in pallet positions rather than in square feet,” said Mr. Swarttouw, who is based in Chicago.
A second phase on the McDonough campus should break ground later this year, adding the company’s “home game” — frozen food — to the dry goods warehouse toured by the king and Queen Maxima, who asked sharp questions about the way to company manages its data and communications among sites.
Founded in 2012 in the Netherlands, a country that is nearly four times smaller in land area than Georgia yet is the second largest exporter of food in the world, NewCold has already encountered many of the trends manifesting in the U.S. today.
“We are a country with 18 million people, and we have around 2.5 million total pallet placements of cold storage. If you compare that to other markets in the world, we are 10 to 20 times more dense, so there’s a lot of competition,” said NewCold founder and CEO Bram Hage.
Labor, in many places, is nonexistent, Mr. Hage said, and where it’s available, it has become too expensive and inflexible to meet the demands of retailers, he added.
Supply constraints have hit home in the U.S. in a new way since the pandemic, said Mike Shawgo, NewCold’s executive vice president of operations.
“We’re feeding America, and it’s hands and feet that move food from a manufacturer to a warehouse, to a distribution center, to the final mile. That’s trucks, people and forklifts — and the pandemic really showed that the supply chains that need resiliency and timely response, particularly in the food industry, were fragile,” Mr. Shawgo said.
That means scale, and it means hiring fewer but more specialized workers into what Mr. Swarttouw calls “mortgage-paying jobs” rather than the transient laborers who staff other facilities.
“We really are able to now create warehousing careers, as opposed to warehousing jobs,” said Mr. Shawgo.
NewCold is vertically integrated, with its own material handling and warehouse management software systems, but it also has many business units, leading to cross-training opportunities and demand for homegrown talent experienced with its proprietary platforms.
Innovation and sustainability, areas where the company sees itself as a market leader, are also resonating more with customers these days.
By packing goods tightly, removing heat given off by forklifts and humans, and keeping a tight building envelope that retains cool air, the company says its warehouses can be 50 percent more energy efficient than those of conventional competitors. NewCold plans to be carbon neutral by 2040.
Press video of the royal visit to NewCold:
Why Henry County?
Before speaking with Conagra, NewCold’s was set to land west of Atlanta, but the open dialogue changed executives’ minds. They decided to go south to avoid encountering city traffic when transporting goods to the Florida market.
NewCold needed a space with ready access to rail connections, a large land footprint, and the ability to build vertically.
“Although we knew where to look, it was very tough to find a location that actually had the right characteristics for us to build a warehouse like this,” Mr. Swarttouw said.
Situated in Georgia, with its strong business environment and readily available incentives, Henry County offered the perfect mix. The additional cold storage facility will likely be 1.5 times the size of its existing building, which is visibly taller but much more compact than the sprawling warehouses under construction nearby.
The location is also near Georgia Tech, whose Supply Chain Logistics Institute updated its agreement with the Dutch Institute of Advanced Logistics, or TKI Dinalog, during the event with the king, while laying out the results of a roundtable on supply-chain resilience held at NewCold during the morning of the royal visit.
In his remarks, Dutch Minister for Infrastructure and Water Management Mark Harbers said Georgia and the Netherlands share a commitment to “processing large volumes of goods as swiftly as possible and just-in-time.” He shared details of an ongoing plan to revitalize Dutch roads, bridges, locks and waterways, calling infrastructure the key building block for supply-chain success.
Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport and the Port of Savannah are to the Southeast U.S. what Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport and the Port of Rotterdam are to Europe, he said, calling for more data-sharing among parties to improve transit between cargo modes.
“Transport and logistics are in the DNA of many Dutch people,” Mr. Harbers said.
After the event, Henry County Development Authority Executive Director F.J. “Josh” Fenn presented the royal couple with framed photos of a garden planted in their honor featuring 12 geraniums, the symbol of McDonough, and 12 daisies, voted over tulips as the Netherlands’ national flower in 2023.
Mr. Fenn added that the occasion marked the “first head of state visit in Henry County’s 203-year history.”
On his second day in Georgia, June 11, the king toured the Savannah port and Savannah State University, where a symposium on marine science was held. He headed to New York on June 12.
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