In this episode, I was joined by the President & CEO of Viking Cold Solutions, James Bell. Viking Cold Solutions is a thermal energy management company that focuses on creating more efficient and environmentally friendly cold storage solutions. James and I discuss how thermal energy works in cold storage and how digitization has become a key component to maximizing the efficiency of your cold storage setup.

Key Takeaways

• Admittedly, I have no direct experience with cold storage so we start off the episode by discussing just exactly what cold storage is. James gives a great breakdown of not only what a cold storage facility is but also a bit about the cold supply chain and some of the operational impacts that are involved. As you can imagine, due to the temperature-sensitive nature of cold storage, there are additional levels of complexity above a standard warehouse. One of these is that it takes much more to build out a cold storage facility and James tells us how cold storage is actually in high demand and supply is low due to the increased home delivery demand of food during the pandemic.
• Digitization is on the rise in our industry overall but James talks specifically about digitization within the cold storage industry. This is very interesting because there is a lot of opportunities to create more efficiency and ultimately save money if your refrigerated warehouse is being properly managed. The digitization of your system gives you the ability to be more flexible with your operation because of the large amounts of data that are able to be collected and then acted upon.
• One of the things that are really interesting about the digitization combined with Viking Cold Solutions setup is that the thermal energy that is being stored can be leveraged to become a profit center. While energy is being generated and stored it may be more than is actually needed. With monitoring capabilities due to digitization, operations are then able to actually sell energy back to the power company by pumping it back into the grid. As James explains, this results in a huge amount of savings for an operation.

Listen to the episode below and let us know your cold storage solutions experiences in the comments.