BISNOW.com: Cold Storage Firm Wants To Solve The Food Supply Chain’s Biggest Problem
U.S. supply chains suffered massive disruption in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic. Vulnerabilities across different sectors were suddenly highlighted, including the fragility of essential food production, storage and consumption.
As restaurants closed their doors to dine-in customers, demand for bulk ingredients began to fall. The food service companies that supply restaurants cut back on orders from farms, but the production of agricultural goods continued.
Farmers typically provide their products to processors and food service companies in bulk. But the food supply chain’s inability to pivot from bulk packaging to consumer-sized packaging meant that the surplus of products couldn’t easily get to grocery stores or food banks, resulting in vast amounts of food waste.
When the pandemic began to ramp up in March last year, Provender Partners CEO Neil Johnson said he immediately started brainstorming ways in which his company could address growing problems in the food space. The firm is an investor and operator of food-related industrial buildings, with an existing cold storage portfolio of more than 5.5M SF.