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Global shipping giant Maersk and Saudi property developer Refad Real Estate have signed a deal for the former to operate a new cold storage facility at King Abdulaziz Port in Dammam. The temperature controlled warehouse will cover an area of 30,000 m2 and will have an annual capacity of 168,000 pallets of fruit and vegetables, frozen goods, processed foods, and dairy products.
Maersk expects to open the doors to the facility to its customers in March 2023. Mohammad Shihab, Managing Director, Maersk Saudi Arabia commented, “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. Our ambition is to connect and simplify our customers’ supply chains. To achieve this, we must be close to our customers, collaborate with trusted and reliable partners and build a network that truly enables global trade. With our new facility in Dammam, we are setting ourselves up to achieve all three goals.”
Maersk’s facility in Dammam will primarily store frozen commodities, although it will also have the capacity to handle chilled cargo. The new warehousing complex is also designed to be extremely environmentally friendly.
To ensure that greenhouse gas emissions are kept to a minimum a 600 kWp solar panel plant will be installed on the facility’s roof to generate at least 15% of the sites power requirement at the start of operations. Additionally an on-site water treatment plant will be installed to cater to all water requirements, to avoid transporting water in trucks from external water treatment plants, while in the near future the trucks shuttling between the facility and King Abdulaziz Port will also be replaced with electric ones to reduce carbon emissions further.
