Temperature-controlled storage has become a commodity to many companies in the cold chain industry, leading to deteriorating service levels, increased waste and reduced supply chain efficiency. Vertical Cold Storage, led by former executives from Cloverleaf Cold Storage and backed by real estate asset manager Platform Ventures, is set to disrupt the industry by focusing on servicing the customer, deploying the latest automation and technology and offering customer-specific logistics solutions.
“We bring a reputation for service and dedication to making our customers’ businesses as strong as possible. At Vertical Cold Storage we will build on that focus and leverage technology and systems integration to ensure our partners can deliver exactly what they want, when they want and where they want it with optimal efficiency,” said Curt Mastbergen, president of Vertical Cold Storage and former president of Cloverleaf.
Vertical Cold Storage is building initial cold storage facilities in Nebraska and Kansas, with others to be announced shortly. The company is also pursuing an acquisition strategy in several markets. “We will grow with our customers, where and how they need us to grow,” said Mastbergen.
The key features of Vertical Cold facilities include frozen, refrigerated and dry storage, blast freezing, exports, case picking, rail transloading, simple EDI setup, real time inventory access, standard processes across all locations and value-added reporting capabilities. Automation for the new facilities is being designed and implemented by an industry leader focused on increasing inventory availability, efficiency and throughput performance.
“At Vertical Cold, we are starting with a clean slate so our facilities will have automation that is the most reliable and productive in the industry, deploy the safest and most cost-effective refrigeration systems and use the latest green best practices. We will also train our teams to drive performance at every level of the supply chain. On the technology side, we will turn data from all parts of the organization into decision-quality information for our customers,” said Ken Smith, senior vice president of Vertical Cold Storage and former vice president of Operations for Cloverleaf.
Platform Ventures, the financial backers of Vertical Cold, has a history of making a wide range of real estate investments, from office space and hospitality to residential.
“Cold storage is one of the most exciting sectors in commercial real estate today and the pandemic has only served to intensify its growth. We were already very interested in the business pre-COVID, but needed the operational experience to create a business model that reduces labor costs through automation and improves performance through decision-making technology. We found that expertise with the Vertical Cold leadership team, and are now on a journey to build a continent-wide network of customer-focused operations,” said Ryan Anderson, co-president & co-founder of Platform Ventures.
More information is available at www.verticalcold.com.
