EXCLUSIVE: Americold’s Port Saint John bet stitching DP World and CPKC into one cold chain

Americold isn’t an ocean carrier, a port operator or a railroad. But it is leveraging partnerships with those entities to build a North American network.

That’s the thesis behind the Atlanta-based company’s newest facility, a roughly US$80 million import-export hub that formally opened in June at one of the fastest-growing container gateways on the Atlantic seaboard.

The Port Saint John project is the first to bring all three of Americold’s strategic partners together in one place: Dubai’s DP World, which runs the box terminal; CPKC (NYSE: CP), whose rail line connects the port to Central Canada and beyond; and Americold itself, which owns and operates the cold chain infrastructure sitting between them.

“The fact that we’re partnering with folks who, every step along the way, what they’re doing is their core competency, I think is going to build a lot of resilience into this solution and partnership model,” said Rob Chambers, who has been Americold’s CEO since Sept. 1, in an interview.

A partnership model, not vertical integration Americold Realty Trust (NYSE: COLD) operates around 230 temperature-controlled facilities worldwide, the majority, about 200, in North America, with the rest spread across Europe, Australia, New Zealand, South America and, through a joint venture, the Middle East. It went public in 2018.

Rather than chase the end-to-end logistics play that has tempted and often later abandoned competitors in the dry-freight world, Americold is collocating warehouses on the networks of best-in-class partners.

The DP World relationship, begun in 2021 and formalized in 2022, produced a cold storage facility at the Port of Jebel Ali in Dubai that went live in 2025. With CPKC, whose network is the only direct one connecting Canada, the U. S. and Mexico by rail, Americold built a flagship facility in Kansas City.

Port Saint John, an eastern hub in New Brunswick, is the convergence point: a DP World-operated terminal sitting on a CPKC rail line.

“This brings together all three partners to be able to really offer a first-of-its-kind facility where we can now give customers the opportunity to ship directly into the eastern seaboard of Canada, have ocean freight unloaded by DP World, stay with Americold in our facility, and then go on a CPKC railcar into Central Canada and beyond,” Chambers said.

Why Saint John By population or conventional site selection, Saint John – long an energy and manufacturing center on New Brunswick’s Bay of Fundy – would not top the list. Americold’s Matthew Moore, who leads global market strategy, said the company looked past the map and at the inefficiencies in how temperature-sensitive goods actually move.

“If we just went to our customers and said, ‘Hey, where should we build?’ it’d be Dallas. It would be the traditional major metro markets,” Moore said. “Probably not too many people would say Kansas City or Port Saint John.” What changed the calculus was the confluence of investment.

Chambers cited close to $750 million in public and private capital flowing into the port over the past decade. That includes DP World’s $247 million West Side modernization that opened in January and lifted terminal capacity from 150,000 twenty foot equivalent units to 1 million TEUs annually. Container throughput hit a record 239,364 TEUs in 2025, up 29.

4% year over year and up 175% since 2021. Doug Smith, chief executive of DP World Canada, has been vocal about a target of 1 million TEUs at the gateway, or roughly four times current volume.

“It made our decision to invest the $80 million into a facility here much easier because we saw multiple hundreds of millions of dollars in investment by our partners,” Moore said.

“For certain goods in and out of the area, it was more efficient to go in and out of Port Saint John than to deal with the uncertainty of Montreal, the labor shortages, or going all the way up to Halifax and having to come by road all the way around.”

[DP World is also backing the Contrecoeur container project at the Port of Montreal, aimed at growing box volume there by 60% to 1. 15 million TEUs, by 2030. ] A new Canadian gateway Today, much of the temperature-controlled product destined for Canada moves through Philadelphia or Newark, N. J. , and is then trucked across the border and through customs.

The Saint John facility, which is the only temperature-controlled storage in Eastern Canada directly connected to a port without drayage, is meant to shorten that path. The facility, Americold’s sixth in Canada, provides about 22,000 pallet positions and is designed to support high-throughput import and export.

Moore said the trade lanes it will serve run to Europe both ways, to South America for protein imports, and potentially all the way to Australia. The shipping lines calling Saint John today include the Gemini Cooperation, the Hapag-Lloyd–Maersk (OTC: AMKBY) alliance launched in February 2025.

Moore said Gemini’s service comes up from South America, with Port Saint John its last port of call in North America before continuing to Europe and return. CMA CGM of France also moves some volume through the port.

The cold chain gap Temperature-sensitive cargo represents about 10% of total global trade flows, Moore said, and the cold chain remains markedly less mature than the dry-freight networks dominated by global forwarders and logistics providers such as DHL, DSV and CEVA Logistics, a unit of CMA CGM.

“You still have a relatively inefficient cold chain compared to the rest of the regular goods that move around, and that’s probably because they just don’t get the high priority that some of the other goods get,” Moore said.

Americold is one of perhaps two players with genuinely global scale in the space, Chambers said, and it has rolled out a single operating system across its sites so customers get a standard experience wherever they ship.

But cold chain integrity can be undone the moment a pallet leaves the warehouse on a non-refrigerated truck or railcar, which is why the company believes the partnership model matters. “You can’t just have one node of it and then immediately violate cold chain integrity as soon as it leaves your facility. Then you’ve not added any value,” Chambers said.

Automation where it pays The Saint John build is conventional, but automation is very much on Americold’s agenda elsewhere. The company is set to open a large automated facility in the Dallas–Fort Worth market at Blue Mound, rail-served by Union Pacific, between November and December.

In an automated building, a 40- to 50-foot clear height becomes 140 feet, with an automated storage and retrieval system, or ASRS, using cranes to stack pallets across 12 to 14 levels. Subsystems can automate trailer unloading, layer picking and repalletizing.

Americold runs in-house engineers who do time-and-motion studies to determine when the return is there. “A few years ago, it was a heavy trend to automate for automation’s sake,” Chambers said. “Americold’s not going to do that. We have the capability and the analytics to determine when to automate.”

The result, he said, is a mix of fully automated, semi-automated and fully conventional facilities. That deliberate approach also explains why retrofitting older, urban, space-constrained port warehouses is so difficult. “You wouldn’t take a 40-foot facility and turn it into a 140-foot facility – you’d scrape it and rebuild it,” Chambers said.

Middle East and beyond Americold’s Middle East footprint is modest today, the Jebel Ali facility and one inland distribution building, though the DP World relationship itself is material.

During the Iran conflict, the impact on the ground was counterintuitive: Ships weren’t leaving, so the Dubai warehouses filled up with export-bound product before normalizing as cargo moved again. “It ended up with some pretty full warehouses for a period of time,” Chambers said, though the overall business impact was not material.

A long runway The partnership architecture is still in its early innings. Americold opened facilities in New Zealand and Sydney this year, and the DFW automated build is weeks away.

Chambers hinted at the eventual shape of the CPKC relationship, a network with cold storage at both ends of the Canadian corridor, the Kansas City anchor in the middle, and ultimately a presence in Mexico. “We’re still, in many ways, in the infancy of this relationship,” he said.

“We expect it to continue to be able to grow, particularly as we prove out the business case through Kansas City and into Saint John.” For customers looking to reach Canada without transiting the United States, Saint John is now an option, and Americold is betting that the co-location model, not vertical integration, is the way to build it.

Why it matters: How logistics providers are leveraging supply chain links to create a dynamic, specialized network.

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