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. window. googletag = window. googletag || {cmd: []}; googletag. cmd.

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display('div-gpt-ad-1709668545404-0'); }); 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. window.

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pubads(). collapseEmptyDivs(); googletag. enableServices(); }); googletag. cmd. push(function() {googletag. display('div-gpt-ad-1665767553440-0'); }); “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