Building a Resilient Future

One of the factors which made the COVID-19 crisis so hard to deal with, was how unprepared we were for a pandemic of this magnitude. While scientists had long suggested that viruses were the greatest threat to our species, and many had been making some preparations for an eventuality such as this, we were still woefully unprepared when SARS-COV-2 came knocking.

However, in an effort to better prepare for such a crisis in the future, we are now seeing an increase in demand for cold chain storage properties. Obviously, cold storage was critical during the COVID crisis – especially when it came to the vaccine rollout – but much of the United States’ cold chain warehouse infrastructure is over 40 years old, and technology has come a long way since then.

While temperature-controlled warehouses are expensive to develop – costing roughly twice as much to build as their conventional counterparts – they are likely to be critical should we face this kind of crisis again in the future – something experts say is all but a certainty.

This has led DB Schenker Americas to expand its Indianapolis Logistics facility (which just happens to share a city address with pharma giant Eli Lilly) to include a 5,000 square-foot cold room and 50,000 square feet of controlled room-temperature space. This more than doubles the facilities existing temperature-controlled space and should provide all the storage needed for temperature sensitive medicines in the future.