Ep. #7: Cold Storage Facility Solutions

from the source features Matt Fleckenstein, who is a cold storage specialist with the first. storage industry and solutions to cold chain challenges. You're listening to right from the source, expert insights on safety, security, and the second. Productivity, energy savings, and control. Yeah. Your industrial or commercial facilities.

Hello listeners. You're listening to the Right Height podcast and joining us today is Matt Fleckenstein, the regional vice president of sales for Right Height. He's also a cold storage specialist. Welcome to the show, Matt. Well thank you very much. So first off, tell us a little bit about yourself, um your role with Right Height and uh how you got into the cold storage industry.

I've been with Right Height for a little over ten years. I've been in the cold storage industry, just uh a little bit over twenty years now. A lot about temperature separation, increasing productivity within the facilities, uh logistics within it. Optimizing temperature separations to to maximize product quality predominantly in the food industry. Coming on is to right height, I uh started as a cold storage. specialist and have evolved into a uh regional vice president of sales as well.

Speaking of cold storage, you mentioned food. What kinds of industries are predominantly using cold storage? In today's environment it's getting broader and broader. You know, y obviously you have food, pharma, you have your floral industries, you've obviously medical research, data storage. Uh it really goes on and on.

Can you talk a little bit about the growth of cold storage, both in terms of the number of facilities and particularly the the size of facilities? What's what's kinda prompted all this? Absolutely. And a lot of that is is prompted through our uh eating and buying habits. The change of instant gratification, having things now, having things sent to the house. Uh the buildings themselves are getting smarter. The layouts of cold storage buildings are tending to get taller.

It's a lot easier to go vertically, drop your cold down, and contain your building much easier. How else are cold storage facilities changing uh besides kind of going vertically and and uh dealing with some of those challenges that you mentioned? Buildings are getting smarter. Knowing when your doors are opening and closing, how often they are.

at the loading dock knowing when trailers are there, different communications, making us safer, more productive on one side of it, l letting people know where the heavy equipment is moving, where personnel is moving. to be more energy efficient, to raise the quality of foods, uh, and to reduce their footprint if possible. Things such as soft wall.

The the cold storage buildings are built a little bit different. It's complete vapor barrier building, meaning that you're not gonna allow humidity or vapor into the building or eliminate it as much as possible. That allows you to make one very large cooler.

and then subdivide it with a soft wall or a curtain wall, which takes a very small footprint. Curtain walls allow them the ability to have say a deli room at twenty eight degrees, put a curtain in between the flu space of the racking, and the next room may be a dairy room at thirty two, then a produce at thirty six. 38, 45, 55 degrees. And again, one of the big reasons for having this minute temperature control is all produce has a optimal temperature to be held at.

And when it's held out of these temperature zones it it uh diminishes the quality and the uh the lifespan of that product.

Now, uh one of the things that the the industry has been kind of seemingly shifting away from is doors, the big heavy, high R value type doors and and moving more towards a a high speed door. Can you talk a little bit about that? Correct, as you talk about a smart as we were talking about a smarter building. We want doors to identify when they're gonna open, when they're gonna close. It was not long ago when a poorly sealed building to combat

humidity in that facility, people would utilize radiant heat, which sounds contrary to what you're really trying to accomplish in a cold storage building. But again, you know, reducing that ice factor in there. However, you have thirty, forty, fifty doors in your facility and you're putting anywhere from seven to eighteen to thirty-six kilowatts of heat on each individual door.

It tends to be about a thousand dollars a year operating costs per kilowatt. So as you can imagine, it gets very costly at this opening. So looking at doors that open quickly. Shut quickly, reduce the amount of energy that requires to defrost these doors and to keep them operable.

Obviously we don't like doors to be hit and nobody should be hitting doors, but it's a very fast-paced environment. Eventually a door will get hit. It's important that that door can take an impact and go back into its plane of service. and still seal up properly. The intelligence of doors has come milestones. They can go back and retrieve matrix of the door, how often it's being used,

how many pass throughs or cycles a day. All these now are is information that can be fed back to the facilities if they need to monitor their operations or their best practices again to run a safe, efficient uh and uh productive facilities. Can we talk a little bit about uh what customers are saying, right hide customers, about these types of trends? I mean, are they are they growing leaps and bounds? Is this something customers are asking for?

Or is this just a solution that Right Height provides that um is kind of an added value that uh they didn't even expect? Everybody's looking for every edge they can to to maximize the profit on a building. That being said, yes, the day of the slow door, vault-style door, metal skin, six inches thick, is getting less and less. But it still comes into application. That's not to say that door is not a valued door. That is a valued door if you're going to use it three times a day. Once a week.

then your R value of the door becomes much more important. On a high volume facility, which most cold storage facilities are, there you're looking at, again, opening and closing that opening as fast as possible. All about the application of it. How often are they going to go through that door? What sort of equipment are they going through that door? Um all plays into the selection of doors.

So let's move this conversation maybe more towards the loading dock. What kinds of things are you hearing from customers uh talking about what they need at the loading dock to ensure that the cold chain is kept? That has changed considerably. We have now what is really become a standard in cold storage, which is identified as a drive-thru application.

And it's a little misleading in the sense of drive-through. A lot of people think of uh a beer distributor where they take the trucks and may drive through physically through the building. application a drive-through means that the trailer is backed up to that loading dock position. Before any doors are open.

The vehicle is then restrained at the dock. The overhead door of the building is then opened, giving access to the trailer. Now, with that being said, access to the trailer, that door should still be shut. and the security tag on that door. So you know that the the tag was not cut in your parking lot down the street at a rest area or two, three states away. And again, the drive-thru is now I've cut that tag and I'm opening the doors into the building.

In allowing to do that, if you had any load shift, if anything fell out of that the back of that trailer, it's now in your clean building. You're opening the doors, you've completed that cold chain. The levelers are stored in a vertical position. So historically they lay down flat parallel to the floor, sit in a pit, and they have a range of motion up and down above and below that dock height.

A vertical leveler is stored straight up, as I said, vertically, redundant safety features in it, that the leveler itself is not allowed to move under the bias of gravity. This also allows you full range of the trailer when that leveler is in place. If you have a 52-inch dock and a 48-inch high trailer, and your goods on that trailer are sidewall to sidewall, if my leveler is below dock height,

On a traditional pit style leveler, I may have trouble getting that load off. It really has a ton of benefits, security, environmental separation, reduced maintenance on your doors. increased access to maintain your levelers. People do get hurt in there annually. There are a lot of safety features that should be on those products. that we we do uh incorporate into the manufacturing of them, they have to be utilized to keep it a safe environment.

Well the uh the drive thru definitely sounds like something anyone in the cold chain should be uh should be considering. Is there anything that uh you feel that we we missed and you'd like to touch on today, Matt? Well

Well I think we started th we started inside. I guess we can turn it around, go backwards a little bit and start about the infiltration. So it really starts out on the loading dock. And again, the ability of that trailer to seal up to the building. Now, traditionally, a lot of facilities also use what they call compression trail.

that's a seal that goes between the building and the trailer to eliminate that the environmental exchange there. That becomes a very violent environment there because you have that eighty thousand, forty to eighty thousand pound trailer. Constantly going up and down and rubbing against that product, that that seal there every time a forklift goes in and out of the trailer. Obviously those those don't last as long as a product called a shelter.

the shelter versus going between the vehicle and the building. Actually the the the trailer penetrates into the shelter. The shelter goes around the perimeter of the vehicle. And then there's also an additional seal that sits in the bottom of the pit. So when you do open that overhead door, there's no white light. There's no air exchange, there's no vi environmental exchange at that door, insect infiltration, rodent infiltration, bird infiltration.

The heat and humidity, if you can stop it from the outside of the building, makes it much more efficient for the evaporators, the cooling systems inside the building, as well as allows the doors to do their job properly. sealing properly or when they are closed and having small energy requirements to operate and a state of fraud. Yeah, so I mean you're talking about solutions that not only help uh facilities stay cold, but you're talking about saving energy, you're talking about safety.

you know, multi pronged kind of uh solution to lots of problems. I didn't have the patience to stay in school to go to medical school, so I had to find another way to save lives. So here we go. Uh is there anything else that you wanted to touch on today, Matt? You know, I really appreciate the opportunity to talk to you a little bit today with regards to this. Um it it is a continuously growing industry. The the safer and more efficient these buildings can be, the better it is for all.

Well, I think that's a perfect point to wrap it up. So we appreciate you being here today, Matt, and uh talking on the Right High Podcast. Absolutely. Appreciate your time. If you enjoyed this episode of Right from the Source, be sure to subscribe on your preferred listening platform and follow Right Height's social media channels. Want more supply chain logistics solutions for your facility? Visit right.com.