Because of increasing consumer interest in a more diverse product selection, healthy foods, and more convenient meal preparation, food manufacturers in dairy, meat, baked goods and produce are supplying a widening array of new SKUs in both chilled and frozen formats. This places an ever increasing demand on cold storage, and with older facilities, it’s not very easy to automate them.

Cold storage construction company Tippmann Innovation has completed a new meat processing and cold storage facility for Wolverine Packing Co. The 180,000-sq.-ft. warehouse provides Wolverine with its fifth processing plant and a second freezer with capacity to store 20,000 pallets.

The Controlled Environment Building Association (CEBA) has named Fisher Construction Group the winner of CEBA’s “Built by the Best” Award for its cold storage facility constructed for NewCold in Tacoma, WA. The project is NewCold’s first facility in the US, and it is reportedly the second high-bay, low-oxygen freezer in the country.

Tippmann Innovation of Fort Wayne, Ind. recently completed a cold-chain assessment for Wawa Inc., one of the nation’s leading convenience store chains. Over the last 60 years, Wawa has developed a reputation for the highest quality products in the country.

The Global Cold Chain Alliance (GCCA) has released a report detailing the results of an 18-month long research initiative.

Just as the Internet makes use of hardware to relay data via the best routes regardless of who owns the hardware, a new “Physical Internet” for the Cold Chain (aka Cold PI) initiative is being developed by Tippmann Innovation (Ti) and Georgia Tech’s Supply Chain and Logistics Institute and the Physical Internet Center.