This winter, Americold was in a small industrial park with a low-rise factory built inside, and a towering metal frame structure towered 140 feet above Plainville.
The company’s cold storage warehouse will not be put into use until sometime next year, but it has been attracting the attention of drivers in the area for several months.
“You have to see it to believe it,” Southington resident Geri Maxwell Gribinas wrote in a Facebook post last week, which attracted nearly 60 replies.
Gribinas calls it “a stunning high-tech building” and advises readers to take a look at the readers of the “Nantton Talk” page before closing the exterior later this spring.
“I have seen progress for several months, and it started with a slender structure,” Helen Henkel replied. “Can’t imagine what it will be.”
“My husband and I just passed by and I took some pictures with my phone. I didn’t know I would get this kind of reaction,” she said. “But it’s definitely worth a visit to see it. It’s like a huge erection unit. And the cooling units are huge-you can only imagine their weight.”
When Americold’s approximately 200,000-square-foot warehouse is completed, it will not be the largest building in Plainville, but it will easily be listed as the tallest. Town planner Garrett Daigle said that the highest point of 146 feet will be 20 feet higher than the chimney of the “Clean Earth” processing plant.
The contractor completed the foundation a few months ago and erected blue shelving units, which rose to almost the entire height of the building. The workers have already begun laying the outer walls.
Daigle said on Thursday: “They are a few weeks behind due to winter, but they hope to complete the external work before the end of summer and should be up and running next year.” “The blue structure is the storage shelf that will support the ceiling of the cold storage area.
Ahold Delhaize USA, the parent company of Stop & Shop, signed a contract with Americold to build dual cold storage warehouses in Plainville and Lancaster, Pennsylvania. The Plainville warehouse will serve Cape Cod and the general area of ​​northern New Jersey.
By building high floors, Americold can use less space on the ground and save utility costs, Daigle said.
“This reduces the footprint and the number of permeable surfaces covered. This is both economical and environmentally friendly.
An automated system using pallet lifts, cranes and conveyors will move frozen food in the warehouse. The main work of the employees will be assembling and packaging transportation and loading and unloading container trucks.