Cold Foods Industry News

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By any measure, 2020 has been a historically difficult year for foodservice distributors. COVID-19 wiped out business for foundational customers like restaurants, hotels, caterers, stadiums, schools and other volume foodservice clients starting in March, and even today, as states attempt to re-open amid the uncertainty of where the pandemic is heading, an argument could be made that foodservice distributors have had to continuously pivot more than any other cold chain segment to stay afloat.

Americold, the world's largest publicly-traded owner and operator of temperature-controlled warehouses, has partnered with Feed the Children, a leading nonprofit focused on alleviating childhood hunger, to support COVID-19 relief for families in crisis.

Looking back on what we’ll call 2020 B.C. (Before Coronavirus), the pipeline for cold storage construction was already robust and healthy. According to research by commercial real estate firm CBRE, overall industrial construction—which encompasses cold storage, along with warehouses, distribution centers, manufacturing facilities, self-storage, office and flex space—was at 298 million square feet (MSF) before COVID-19, bolstered by the ongoing rise of e-commerce. 

In the upcoming September issue of Refrigerated & Frozen Foods, we highlight the pandemic pivots made by Sysco and US Foods in 2020 due to COVID-19 and its effect on foodservice clients like restaurants, hotels, caterers, stadiums, and other volume venues. While putting that story together, we also had a chance to speak to another foodservice distribution giant, Golden State Foods (GSF) and its Chairman and CEO, Mark Wetterau.

Flowers Foods, producer of Nature’s Own, Dave’s Killer Bread, Wonder, Tastykake, and other bakery foods, announced that Brad Cashaw has been named chief supply chain officer, effective September 8, 2020. Cashaw will be responsible for Flowers’ supply chain operations and report to Brad Alexander, chief operating officer. 

Foster Farms will close the main Livingston processing plant on Tuesday evening, September 1 and not resume operations until Monday evening, September 7.  During this downtime, the company will complete two rounds of deep cleaning and two rounds of COVID-19 testing covering all 1,400 plant employees. The testing program will ensure that all workers first reentering the plant on September 7 will be free of COVID-19. 

Prairie Farms’ Caves of Faribault cheese has won the bronze award in the ‘Cheese – Cow Milk’ category as part of the Specialty Food Association’s (SFA) 2020 sofi Awards, a top honor in the $158 billion specialty food industry.

Apex Motion Control, specialists in robotics and automation for the baking and food industry, has created a new function for its Baker-Bot: end of line palletizing.

CCS (Carter Control Systems) has officially begun manufacturing operations out of a new 40,000-square-foot facility on Monroe Avenue in Frederick, Maryland.

Harpak-ULMA announced the launch of its PaperSeal packaging technology as part of the company’s initiative to fundamentally rethink packaging systems to promote green packaging alternatives across the food industry.