Maersk signed an agreement with Refad Real Estate to operate a brand-new cold storage facility at King Abdulaziz Port in Dammam, Saudi Arabia. The company will open the doors to the facility in March 2023 for its customers. The cold storage facility is 13,300 sq m and is capable to handle 168,000 pallet positions annually at Saudi Arabia’s second-largest port for refrigerated containers.
“Saudi Arabia is a significant market for us. With more than a fifth of the country’s food imports coming through King Abdulaziz Port in Dammam, we wanted to establish a state-of-the-art cold storage facility that will help us serve the food industry better”, said Mr Mohammad Shihab, Managing Director, Maersk, Saudi Arabia.
Maersk’s cold storage facility at King Abdulaziz Port in Dammam will primarily serve the requirement to store frozen commodities such as poultry, meat, vegetables, confectionary, and processed food. The facility will also house chilled cargo such as dairy products and seasonal fruits. The facility will be equipped with world-class standards when it comes to temperature and humidity control. This will help ensure minimum to no food wastage during its storage at the facility. The customers will also get complete visibility on these parameters, thus creating transparent and trusted operations.
A 600 kWp solar panel plant will be installed on the facility’s roof to generate at least 15% of the power requirement at the start of operations. This power plant can be extended to cover most energy requirements in the future.
An on-site water treatment plant will be installed to cater to all facility water requirements. This will avoid transporting water in trucks from external water treatment plants, thus eliminating the carbon emissions from driving these trucks for almost 87,600 km per year. Soon, the trucks shunting between the facility and King Abdulaziz Port’s terminal will also be replaced with electric ones to reduce carbon emissions further.
Source: Maersk
