Five Questions to Ask Before You Pick a Cold Storage Provider

Question 1: What can you do with my product beyond storing it?

Almost no one asks this on the first call. They should.

Every serious cold storage facility can hold product at temperature. What separates a capable partner from a commoditised one is what happens to the product while it's there. Value-added services are how a cold store stops being a holding space and becomes part of the supply chain.

Across the One Frio platform, those services are deliberately specialised by site. At Grolleman, fresh and frozen proteins move through plate freezing and blast freezing. At Coenen Boxmeer, order picking and custom box assembly for snack and food products are core to the offering. At NedCool, long-term controlled atmosphere storage preserves apples, pears, and citrus for months at a time.

"We don't just sell frozen or cold storage. We sell services. And that's really what adds revenue to the pallet, for us, and for the customer."

Frenk Beker, One Frio

Buyers focused only on price or capacity rarely raise this themselves. A capable partner will. If a provider can't articulate what they do beyond storage, that's the answer.

Question 2: Do you have genuine expertise in my product category?

Cold chain isn't a single industry. Frozen proteins, fresh produce, and packaged foods have entirely different technical, regulatory, and operational requirements. A partner with deep experience in one category may be largely irrelevant in another.

The test is whether a provider can look at how you currently run and tell you what to do differently.

Frenk Beker recently met with a fresh meat producer using a labour-heavy crate-to-pallet process. The conversation moved from storage capacity to redesigning the workflow.

"We advised them to switch to plate freezing. You deliver a pallet box with fresh meat, we handle the freezing ourselves, and produce blocks ready for palletisation. Same result, significantly less labour, better logistics flow for the customer."

Frenk Beker, One Frio

That kind of advice only comes from a provider who knows the product well enough to see the gap between how a client is operating and how they could be.

Question 3: How are you connected, and who else in your network can help me?

This is the question that separates a single site from a platform.

A standalone operator can serve clients within one geography and one product scope. A multi-site platform can do something materially different: connect clients across borders, route them to specialist capabilities they didn't know existed, and solve problems that weren't part of the original brief.

A recent example: a Dutch client had a recurring last-mile challenge in Ireland, a market where they had no logistics presence and limited local relationships. Solving it through their existing single-site provider would have meant onboarding a new partner from scratch, in a new jurisdiction, with no continuity. Instead, Frank introduced them directly to Alan Thompson (Commercial Director) at McCulla, One Frio's Northern Irish facility. One conversation, one relationship, one platform, and a problem that had been open for months started moving.

This is what platform thinking actually looks like. It isn't about the number of sites a provider operates. It's about whether those sites function as a network, and whether the commercial team is structured to move clients across that network when the opportunity arises.

Question 4: Who will I be dealing with day to day?

The person who knows your intake schedule, your seasonal volumes, your quality specs, and your product quirks is the person who makes the partnership work. They need to be reachable, knowledgeable, and genuinely invested.

Across the One Frio platform's Dutch entities, around 90% of the customer base is local. Many of those relationships predate One Frio itself, and the platform protects them deliberately.

"Dutch clients are really interested in having fixed local contacts. That's something we already prioritise. Even as a pan-European platform, the experience at facility level is very local, very familiar."

Frank Nispeling, One Frio

This reflects the kind of business One Frio acquires. Each entity on the platform was family-owned. The owner was on the floor. Clients dealt with people, not departments. That culture doesn't survive a change of ownership by accident, it survives because the platform is designed to preserve it.

The commercial team is the entry point. Once a client is onboarded, the day-to-day relationship lives at the facility, with the people who actually run the operation.

Question 5: What does onboarding look like, and how do you handle the transition?

The first conversation tells you what a provider can do. Onboarding is where the promise either holds or doesn't.

For businesses moving volume off an incumbent or starting fresh, the questions that matter are practical. How quickly does the provider absorb your specs? Who manages the transition? What happens when high-level alignment turns into operational detail, pallet specs, label formats, freezer throughput, IT integration?

At One Frio, the commercial team owns the early stages: understanding the product, identifying the right entity and services, aligning on commercials. As the conversation moves into operational specifics, the relevant facility team joins directly.

"When conversations get specific, how many kilograms through the plate freezer, what label format, what pallet spec, that's when the entity joins. We keep the helicopter view, and bring in the people who know every operational detail."

Frank Nispeling, One Frio

Two stages. Commercial alignment first, operational handoff second. Clients aren't asked to navigate a large organisation on their own, and accountability is clear at every step.

The thread running through all five questions is the same. Cold storage isn't a commodity when it's done well. The providers worth working with are the ones who treat your product as their problem, and who have the network, expertise, and discipline to do something useful about it.

If you're evaluating cold storage partners in Northwest Europe, get in touch. We'll tell you honestly whether One Frio is the right fit, and if we're not, we'll often know who is.