What are a few of your cold storage challenges with beer?
What are a few of your cold storage challenges with beer? Maintaining the cold chain and meeting suppliers’ product requirements is an ongoing challenge. We view integrity of the cold chain as a shared responsibility and partnership. Each link plays a critical role in product freshness. The explosion of craft beer, such as New Belgium and Sierra Nevada, also required us to expand our distribution center. In order to meet craft beer’s temperature requirements we needed to create a separate temperature controlled area as craft beer has a lower storage temperature than a case of beer.
In searching for a new distribution facility, what were your top priorities?
Given the fact that we were moving into a leased facility, we were looking for an insulated curtain wall that would create temperature-controlled areas without impacting the structure of the facility. In addition, the cost of a conventional wall system was prohibitive; we needed a thermal wall solution that would provide us superior temperature control at a fraction of the cost of a conventional wall.
YOU chose InsulWall® Temperature Control Curtains to retrofit your new distribution center how has it impacted your business?
InsulWall allowed us to create a 9,000 square foot temperature-controlled room within our 55,000 square foot leased space quickly – installation was completed in one week. InsulWall also provided us flexibility to reconfigure the distribution center without structural impact to the leased space. The real test has been whether InsulWall can meet temperature requirements in the 100° plus east Texas heat. The air conditioning unit is actually cycling off each day after we complete movement of the product –proving to us that InsulWall holds the temperature at brewery standards and has exceeded our expectations for temperature control.