Cold storage capacity increasing globally

In 2016, China built the most new cold stores; 31 million m3 extra space was added. India still has the largest cold store capacity, 141 million m3 in total. India, the US and China were the only three countries that each had more than 100 million m3 cold store capacity available last year, according to GCCA, the Global Cold Chain Alliance.

Of countries with a smaller volume, Uzbekistan, Turkey and Mexico reported a substantial growth capacity, 1.6 million m3 in Mexico and 2.4 million m3 in Turkey and Uzbekistan. In North Africa in 2016, total cold store space was 6 million m3 larger than in 2014, and increase of 4.6 per cent. The US was good for an increased capacity of 3.2 million m3.

Part of the global expansion of cold store capacity can be attributed to the reporting of countries that were previously not in the database. Reported changes added approximately 11 million m3 to the capacity expansions in GCCA’s database. Countries that have been added to the database are South Korea, Peru, Mauritius, Ecuador and Kenya.

The cold store capacity in most European countries decreased between 2014 and 2016. The storage capacity in Europe amounted to 112 million m3. Turkey and the UK were exceptions to that downwards trend. More than 2.4 million m3 of cold stores were built in Turkey in the past two years. For the UK, a total capacity of 32 million m3 has been reported, which is also an increase. A significant share of that increase, however, can be attributed to better market monitoring. The Netherlands is in ninth place in the international top twenty, with a total of 14 million m3 storage capacity.