Changes made to plans for FreezPak’s new Jacksonville facility (Courtesy of the Jacksonville Business Journal) — Last year, third-party food logistics company FreezPak Logistics, announced its 272,400-square-foot, temperature-controlled warehouse was set to break ground in Jacksonville in the first quarter of 2023.
Now, the company says that date has been pushed to the second quarter, and alterations have been made to the project’s original plan.
Though Freezpak did not comment on any reasons for the change in date, it did note that multiple shifts in the original plan would take place.
The cold storage warehouse is expected to break ground in a few months, according to David Saoud, Freezpak co-founder and CEO, creating a facility that will take in products such as fresh chicken and poultry to freeze with its minus-10-degree blast freeze technology.
“We’ll have fresh poultry coming in from the plants where they’re produced, and then we will put them into our blast freezer at minus 10 Fahrenheit, freezing the fresh product for export out of the country,” said co-founder Mike Saoud.
The facility was originally slated to include 42 robots, bringing Freezpak’s robotic fleet to a total 129. Now, no robotics will be used in the new building, and the company says it plans on creating roughly 80 to 100 jobs in this new warehouse.
The facility will also use its own trucking services for import and export through Jaxport, located just a few miles away.
“Proximity to the port is just a huge win for both us and the customers,” Saoud said. “Where this development is, we get to be a green company and be more efficient with more volume.”
The project is expected to be completed within 14 months after breaking ground sometime in the second quarter. This is the second project in Florida for the New Jersey-based company, with another in Miami that was slated to open late last year but is still under construction, according to the Freezpak website.