While the company founder Horst Bartels personally broke ground for this location in a ceremony at the end of November 2018 and the topping-out ceremony was celebrated in September 2019, the opening on Tuesday morning went off without a hitch. Dr. Falk Bartels, who had traveled from the company's headquarters in Schortens, Friesland, as a representative of the management, was particularly pleased that it also went smoothly: "After our new location in Herne received its EU approval yesterday, nothing stood in the way of the first storage today. I would like to congratulate our branch manager Thorsten Schäckel and his young team on their premiere! In view of the future importance of the location in our logistics network, together with the high degree of automation of the facility, this step marks a milestone in the history of Nordfrost."

In a construction period of 17 months, the most modern deep-freeze warehouse in Germany with 70,000 pallet spaces was built on the 13-hectare site directly on the A42. The new building in Herne is divided into two parts, namely a conventional and an automated part with a high-bay warehouse and order picking.

The conventional part consists of three warehouses. This was opened last Tuesday, providing the market with a further 28,000 storage spaces. The fully automated high-bay warehouse (42,000 storage spaces) will commence operations towards the end of the year with the associated automated picking system, which is a first for logistics service providers in the frozen food sector in Germany. Work on the building, the refrigeration technology and the outdoor facilities has been completed apart from the remaining work. The conveyor technology has also largely been installed. Tests are currently being carried out by the system supplier in collaboration with IT and the local Nordfrost technical department. In addition to modern refrigeration technology and combined heat and power units, Nordfrost has for the first time installed a fuel cell as a particularly sustainable measure for generating energy and ensuring fire protection in the high-bay warehouse.

A team of initially 24 employees will be working in Herne at the start. This consists of colleagues from other Nordfrost branches, who have mainly transferred to Herne from locations in North Rhine-Westphalia, as well as newly recruited employees. Most of these were trained at other locations of the logistics company with some lead time. Other candidates are already scheduled to work in Herne and will be deployed at the new location at short notice.

Nordfrost will not only store and pick frozen goods at the Herne branch. The logistics center, which sets new standards with its generous space for frozen goods handling, will in future be the largest hub in the company's transport network. From here, products will be distributed in North Rhine-Westphalia and national and international flows of goods will be bundled.

With the new facility in Herne, Nordfrost now has 13 logistics locations in North Rhine-Westphalia. The family-owned company is Germany's market leader for frozen food logistics and operates 40 of its own logistics centers in Germany, currently with a total of 800,000 pallet spaces. Some of these branches also serve as a base for the fine distribution of frozen goods, which are delivered on behalf of the food industry and food retailers, primarily to supermarkets and bulk consumers such as restaurants and canteens.

Nordfrost, headquartered in Schortens near Wilhelmshaven, is Germany's leading frozen food logistics company and operates internationally. The family-run company, which was founded in 1975, generated sales of 430 million euros in 2019 and has 3,000 employees at 40 deep-freeze warehouse locations in Germany with a constantly growing capacity of currently 800,000 pallet spaces. These form the basis of a nationwide groupage network for the fine distribution of frozen goods. Nordfrost dispatches 1,600 trucks every day.