Hot Cities for Cold Storage: Mobile

The Gateway to the Gulf, Mobile is Alabama’s oldest city and among the fastest growing containerized cargo seaports in North America. With importance as a trading center dating back to French colonists and Native Americans and Alabama’s place as one of the largest poultry producing states in the U.S., the Port of Mobile is poised for expansion in 2023.

Located in the northern Gulf of Mexico with access to an international airport and two interstate systems (I-65 running north/south and I-10 running east/west), the Port of Mobile saw record container shipping numbers in 2022, with 563,191 twenty-foot equivalent container units (TEUs) handled. Since, 2015, the Port of Mobile’s volume has grown by 120%, according to figures provided by the Alabama Port Authority.

“Location, location, location. Located in the heart of the booming southern United States and with an aggressively expanding port, Mobile is an effective location for import distribution, domestic distribution and export cargos,” said Ernie Ferguson, director of Business Development for Lineage Logistics, who in 2021 opened a $61 million cold storage and distribution center at the Port of Mobile, one of the largest of its kind in the Southeast.

“For import and domestic production, Mobile can serve as a distribution hub, effectively serving Atlanta, north Florida and the entire Gulf Coast,” Ferguson said. “With close proximity to the heart of poultry production, Mobile is an ideal location for those processors to export frozen poultry around the globe.”

Just two years ago the port had around 5 million cubic feet of storage. Lineage’s facility more than doubled that total space, to 17 million cubic feet, and added 40,000 pallet positions.

“The facility is located less than a mile for the container terminal gate and offers max-loading capabilities where only the cargo capacity of the container is restrictive. Additionally with capacity for 30 truckloads of blast per day, the facility can support a significant volume of protein exports,” Ferguson said

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*Image courtesy Lineage Logistics.