Offshore takeover of cold storage strengthens as Americold buys Lago

Combined they offer more than 25,000 pallet spaces for frozen, chilled and ambient temperature stored goods.

“We are pleased to announce our agreement to acquire Lago Cold Stores, which expands our presence in the Brisbane, Australia market,” said Fred Boehler, president and CEO of Americold.

“Once completed, this acquisition will add three strategically located assets to our portfolio, growing our footprint in Brisbane and increasing our presence in Australia to more than 56 million cubic feet (1.6 million cubic metres). ”

Lago Cold Stores, led by its race car-driving chief executive, Roger Lago, is the latest local cold storage operator to be acquired by a major offshore corporate player.

The sector, which provides specialist temperature-controlled facilities for the storage and distribution of fresh and frozen food as well as medicines was until recently the domain of a number of family-owned businesses such as Lago, Swire, Oxford and Montague.

However, over the last five years, as scale and technology have become key factors alongside access to private equity capital, the sector has rapidly consolidated in Australia with Americold, and Lineage Logistics emerging as the country’s two biggest players alongside Dutch-based NewCold, which has built two huge warehouses in Melbourne for customers like McCain and Peters Ice Cream.

Consolidation kicked off in earnest in 2018 when Texas-based Emergent Cold acquired Swire Cold Storage including its 15 warehouses. It later added 61-year-old Montague Cold Storage and 44-year-old Oxford Cold Storage to its local operations.

Then, in a case of the bigger fish eating the smaller fish, Lineage Logistics bought Emergent Cold for $1.3 billion, creating an Australian network of 30 temperature-controlled warehouses offering 3.4 million cubic metres of storage space and capacity for over 522,000 storage pallets.

Americold is the world’s biggest listed owner, developer and operator of temperature-controlled warehouses,

It owns and operates 246 temperature-controlled warehouses in North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific, and South America.

The company swung to a US$13.4 million ($18.2m) loss in the second quarter of the year because of disruptions in the global food supply chain. Revenue rose 35.7 per cent to US$654.7 million.

In June, NewCold said it would build Australia’s largest, cold storage warehouse, and one of the biggest in the world, after securing food manufacturing giant Simplot as a new customer.