New Agristo cold-store nears completion

In December Potato Processor Agristo completed a new phase in the construction of the new deepfreeze warehouse in Nazareth, the installation of the automated stacker cranes.

On Tuesday, December 8, the last of the eight cranes was hoisted into the high-bay warehouse. The installation will be put into operation from the end of February in order to ensure the completion of the entire project, planned for late March 2016.

Egemin installed the 23-tonne cranes in the eight crane aisles of the warehouse, which has 15 storage levels. The lifting operations required a great deal of precision because of the bad weather conditions at the time, but also because of the size of the cranes.

With the last crane in place, the roofing and outer wall elements are being fixed to the warehouse racks of the clad rack construction, and also other areas of the warehouse.

The warehouse will be completely cold drawn in February. During the cooling, the installations will be tested and adjusted continuously, so that upon reaching -25°C, the warehouse will be fully operational.

Carmen Wallays, Procurement & Logistics Director at Agristo:

"The first Agristo pallets need to find a temporary place in our new cold store in early March."

"This 15-million-euro investment is part of the continuing growth of Agristo and it is the first step in expanding production at the production site in Nazareth in East Flanders."

Storage of 17,500 tonnes of potato product at -25°C

Eight stacker cranes will be responsible for the automated storage of 24,500 euro pallets, or almost 17,500 tonnes of frozen potato products at temperatures of -25°C. The new warehouse will be able to process 360 pallet movements per hour.

Carmen Wallays:

"Since Agristo produces seven days a week and has a logistics department that operates 16 hours a day, five days a week, large buffers must be processed quickly."

"Fast dispatch is also important, so that trucks can be loaded quickly and no time will be lost this way."

The clad rack structure of the new deepfreeze warehouse is specifically designed to be durable in its use of energy. All installed cranes are equipped with an internal energy recovery system and the energy released during lowering and braking of the cranes is recovered and used for lifting and driving movements.


Project partners

Apart from Egemin, the other partners in the project are Synergo, Stow, Alheembouw, Cofely Axima and Isocab Construct.