Cold storage, food processing, and last-mile cold distribution for the long-duration food investor.
Cold chain real estate is one of the few remaining commercial real estate categories where the building is the business. Reefer doors, drainage, refrigeration capacity, and floor specification dictate what an operator can do — and what they will pay.
How we work in cold chain & food infrastructure.
Cold storage cap rates compressed sharply between 2019 and 2022 as institutional capital discovered the category. They have since normalized, and the easy money is gone. What remains is a category where careful underwriting still produces outsized risk-adjusted returns — if the underwriting actually understands the asset.
A 200,000 square foot cold storage building is not 200,000 square feet of industrial with refrigeration. The refrigeration system has a depreciation schedule independent of the structure. The drainage and floor specification dictate what products can be stored and what the conversion cost is to change. The dock-door count and refrigerated truck staging area determine what kind of operator can use the building. We underwrite all of it.
Our cold chain practice spans third-party-logistics cold storage, food processor owner-occupier dispositions, and increasingly the food-grade dry processing category — which trades at cold-chain-adjacent cap rates because of the regulatory overlay even though the building is unrefrigerated.