Cold storage facility opens in Port of Oakland

Lineage Cool Port Oakland is a collaboration between Lineage Logistics and Dreisbach Enterprises.

   A new cold storage and logistics facility has opened in the Port of Oakland.
   Lineage Cool Port Oakland is a joint venture between Lineage Logistics, ranked by the International Association of Refrigerated Warehouses as the second-largest refrigerated warehousing and logistics provider in the U.S., and a local 3PL, Dreisbach Enterprises, which offers transportation services and has two facilities for perishable commodities in Oakland and Richmond, Calif.
   Set on 25 acres within the Port of Oakland, the Cool Port will provide a facility to transload cargo between rail cars, trucks and refrigerated ocean containers.
   The 280,000-square-foot depot will have 90 truck dock doors and rail sidings. It will be able to send up to 1 million tons of perishable product through the Port of Oakland annually.
   Cool Port says it will be a “secure, fully cold-chain compliant facility” with 20,000 pallet positions, three blast cells and a 100,000-square-foot, high-cube, multi-temperature storage environment.
    The company says it will offer full range of services, including rail transload and truck cross-dock operations, frozen and refrigerated storage, import-export services, as well as onsite U.S. Department of Agriculture inspection and labeling capabilities.
   Greg Lehmkuhl, the president and chief executive officer of Lineage, said Cool Port will be “one of the fastest, most cost-effective and quality-controlled means of transporting perishable foods internationally.” Lineage has more than 100 facilities around the country.
   Jason Dreisbach, the president of Dreisbach Industries, said exporters of beef, pork and poultry are expected to be the primary customers for the new facility, including companies such as Tyson, JBS and Smithfield Foods. He said it is expected to be attractive to companies exporting to countries in Asia, including Japan and Korea.
   The new facility “will be part of the Lineage network,” said Dreisbach. “The whole premise is to be able to provide a seamless supply chain solution. Lineage has deep relationships with a lot of these protein producers in their Midwest facilities currently. We will be offering solutions to the customers to get product transited to the West Coast and facilitate the export here in Oakland.”
   He said there is also new interest from citrus exporters, in part because hours of service requirements and electronic logging devices are making it difficult for truckers to make turns on inland containers and that they are finding it may be better to transload cargo at the port.
   He said the company also will service imports, most of which today are frozen fruit commodities. “We think that is a segment we can grow,” said Driesbach.
   When the facility is fully ramped up, he said the company should be able to handle the equivalent of 150 40-foot containers a day.
    About half of the product arriving at the facility is expected to come by rail and half in over-the-road trucks. Refrigerated boxcars are an attractive way to ship meat and poultry from the Midwest or Southeast, though Dreisbach explains over-the-road trucking is used because some agriculture producers are located at inland locations that are not convenient to rail.
   The company said up to 36 rail cars per day could be loaded into shipping containers at Cool Port. Older refrigerated box cars carry as much as two ocean containers of product and newer jumbo refrigerated box cars carry enough product to fill as many as three containers.
   Rail is used for frozen product, while fresh meat is generally moved by truck because of the faster transit time.
   The new facility is designed to be energy efficient. There will be electrical plug-ins at every truck dock door and another 65 plugins for trucks in the yard.
   Dreisbach said the facility has a custom-built fleet of 25 tractors and 250 chassis that will be used for the drayage to ocean terminals. He explained that these are lightweight pieces of equipment so that instead containers only being loaded with 55,000 pounds of product, containers will be able to carry 65,000 pounds. That will create ocean freight savings for shippers. He also explained the when cargo arrives by truck, instead of four trailers being loaded into three containers, the ratio will improve from three trailers to two containers.
   He said that will save give Oakland an advantage when competing with other ports such as Los Angeles and Long Beach.
    “Cool Port has significantly enhanced the breadth of services and capabilities the Port of Oakland is able to provide customers looking to import and export temperature-controlled goods through our terminal,” said Chris Lytle, executive director of the Port of Oakland.