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One word describes Savannah in June: Hot.
While many locals are debating between button-up shirts and polos for work, a select few are escaping the heat by heading to a location in Pooler where temperatures are as low as 20 below zero.
At Nordic Cold Storage, the company’s employees don insulated overalls and parkas to keep warm while blast freezing poultry and pork and moving up to 30 million pounds of refrigerated imports and exports per week.
The facility, which just recently opened, has already built a strong customer base. To celebrate its successful opening, Nordic invited state and local officials to tour the new facility just six miles from the Port of Savannah.
“We have been open for about eight weeks,” said Nordic’s president and CEO, Don Schoenl. “We have 20,000 tons of product that has come through the building already.”
The state-of-the-art $30 million facility occupies more than 200,000 square feet of space and employs just over 100 people. Schoenl said the company plans to expand its facility to accommodate imported produce from Central America and could eventually employ 350 to 400 people.
“Savannah is the biggest port for exports of refrigerated products in the country,” he said. “What we hope is that we are going to balance that with being the busiest refrigerated container port for imports on the East Coast.”
The Georgia Ports Authority is also in the process of installing 20 additional refrigerated racks at the Garden City Terminal that will accommodate up to 2,600 cargo containers per week.
Gretchen Corbin, the Georgia Department of Economic Development’s deputy commissioner for global commerce, praised Nordic’s impact on the metro Savannah and Georgia economies.
“We talk about a Hartsfield-Jackson International that has the best cold-chained logistics airport, as well as the Savannah port that has the great logistics system here,” she said. “When you put that with our interstate system and also with our rail system, you just can’t beat us in Georgia.”
According to GPA Executive Director Curtis Foltz, refrigerated exports via the Port of Savannah have increased 130 percent over the last seven years and frozen poultry — the highest volume product moved through Nordic’s facility — is the fastest growing commodity moving through Georgia.
Foltz said he was extremely impressed with the speed and attention to detail of the Nordic team demonstrated when planning and executing development of the new facility.
“I got to tell you, this is an extremely exciting day for us in the port authority and for this community and for the entire state,” he said.
He said GPA plans to work with the company in future operations.
“We are going to work hard to make sure (Nordic’s) experience post-opening is exceeded and better than pre-opening.”
Nordic also stands to benefit from the planned deepening of the harbor from 42 to 47 feet.
“Obviously, our business is dependent on the economics of shipping to points throughout the world,” Schoenl said.
“The deepening of the harbor allows us to stay competitive … The harbor deepening allows for larger ships, which guarantees the economics of using Savannah over any other port in the Southeast. The harbor deepening allows Savannah to maintain its competitive edge.”
ABOUT NORDIC LOGISTICS AND WAREHOUSING LLC
Nordic is the second largest cold storage operator in the Southeast and the eighth largest in North America. Based in Atlanta, Nordic provides cold storage and distribution services to major food producers, distributors, retailers and other customers.
The company operates 13 facilities in Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, North Carolina and South Carolina with more than 70 million cubic feet of temperature-controlled storage space.