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The New Warehouse podcast hosted by Kevin Lawton is your source for insights and ideas from the distribution, transportation, and logistics industry. A new episode every Monday morning brings you the latest from industry experts and thought leaders. And now, here's Kevin.

Hey guys, it's Kevin with the New Warehouse Podcast. I'm here at the MHI headquarters and I am being joined by two representatives of the Conveyor Shortation Solutions Industry Group today. And today we're going to talk about deep freezers and we're going to talk about

some of the equipment and technology that can go into them and what's possible with those as well. So I'm going to be joined by Matt Rivenbark and he is the VP of Sales and Marketing at Gebhardt Interlogistics and also Steve Wilson who is Account Executive over at Slate River Systems, also known as SRSI for short as well. So gentlemen, welcome. Thanks for joining me today. How are you? Good, good. Thanks for having us. Thank you. Absolutely. Happy to talk about this conversation.

Cool conversation, we could say, potentially. Sorry, couldn't resist. But so why don't we kick it off a little bit. Let's get just kind of high level definition of what a deep freeze facility is and tell us a little bit too about some of the complexities in that type of facility versus a regular ambient facility.

It is what it says it is, right? So it's a frozen environment, which is incredibly difficult to number one staff. I mean, it's not the easiest thing to get somebody to say, hey, come work for me in my negative 20 freezer picking ice cream. You know, it's just very difficult work conditions, not just for the people, but also for the equipment itself, right? You got to do a lot of upgrades to the equipment to make sure that it's

working and not freezing in that temperature. So it's just an incredibly difficult thing to manage, both from a material hand equipment perspective, but also a personnel perspective. Yeah. Yeah. And I think it's definitely challenging. I mean, I've been in a deep freezer before and it is mighty cold. Absolutely. And I see people working in there and I think, obviously, kudos to them and hat tips to them that are in that environment working every day. But when we look at those

complexities, right? And we talk about, you know, obviously, you know, no one really ideally wants to be in that type of temperature environment. So, you know, we try to be as hands-off as possible there. So if we look at, you know, some of the equipment, you mentioned in there a little bit about the equipment, but the equipment and automation in general, I mean, are we seeing applications where, you know, we can truly get these human hands off and out of the freezer?

You know, when you look at just conveyance inside, the way technology has advanced over the last, let's call it 10, 15 years, being able to go into a deep freeze, take product in from a loading dock, convey it in through some roll-up doors, a little vestibule, and then take it into a deep freezer for storage, and then use an ASRS or cranes to

pick and place product and then deliver it back out to keep your workforce out of that deep freeze area is key. I mean, if you look at regulations out there right now, the workforce can't even be in a freezer eight hours. It's just, it's

it's not legal. They're only allowed, the regulations state 15 minutes at a time and then it's 15 minutes out or? I thought it was 45 minutes in and 15 minutes out. Right, but you're limited. I mean, you're baking in a lot of downtime just because it doesn't work well with the body to be in that type of, even if you have the best cold gear out there, you still being in that deep freezer for that period of time is just not healthy on the system.

Yeah, anything you want to add? I would say in general to manage that, I mean, that 45 minutes in, 15 minutes out. I mean, it's not just that you have to have downtime, but you also have to have additional staff to cover that because basically you rotate people in and out, right? It's hard enough staffing a warehouse these days. Imagine how much more difficult that is in this environment, right? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it adds that layer of challenging aspect to that labor piece, like you mentioned. Absolutely right.

So if we look at that and we'll talk a little bit more about the automation and the technology that you can put in there in a little bit. But I'm curious as we look at planning out a cold storage facility, and I think it's no secret that cold storage has been in high demand too, right? Especially since the pandemic and a lot more online grocery has been going on and things of that nature.

know what are you know some of the crucial elements when you're planning out those facilities to to have that balance you know for for the labor on one point and then also from an equipment perspective what are some of those crucial elements to really plan out a facility the right way so yeah i mean in general probably the most important thing is just planning your material flow right making sure that

your tracking inventory in from the dock and through your different areas of the system because it's not like a cold storage facility is all freezer. Typically there's, you know, the dock area is going to be chilled. You know, your freezer is going to be freezer. You can have different temperature zones within that. Like you have zero degrees, minus 10, minus 20 for things like ice cream. So it's making sure you plan your material flow in a way that makes sense from your temperature zones and crossing between those zones is absolutely critical.

And you also have to understand the equipment type because as you have different zones, you have different temperature areas, there's different pieces of MEG equipment that work in different environments and don't work in others. If you look at AMR technology, it's a great technology. It works great in ambient. You can't use those in freezers. It just does not work. That technology is not there yet. So you have to understand how that setup is in order to plan the technology and actually plan your warehouse out properly. Right.

Right. And following along with that, I think density is a huge thing to consider when you're doing a cold store. Obviously, if you have a lot of unused space that's just there, you have to pay to cool that, right? And so making sure your product is as dense as possible, that's why ASRS a lot of times make a lot of sense in the freezer because you can be way more dense than you would be in a traditional conventional type of warehouse. So not only does that give you less space to cool, but in general, when you have less space,

The stuff stays cooler anyway. There's more air around it, right? So it's a better solution. Yeah, absolutely. And I think that density makes a lot of sense there because like you said, if you have empty space, like an ambient, it's just like, well, it's just space there, right? But in this, you're paying so much more to keep that space cold and just keep it cold air basically. And if it's not being utilized, right? So I think in that regard,

When we look at cold storage, one of the top factors is kind of the energy cost. - 100%. - To keep these things cold, it takes a lot of energy to be able to do that. We know when our parents tell us not to leave the refrigerator open, right? Imagine that.

know extrapolate it how many times right exactly the two most expensive things they have in a cold storage warehouse are the people and the energy to cool yeah absolutely so those are two big expenses definitely so tell us a little bit about you know how do you go about keeping that energy cost to to a minimum i mean it's a necessary thing that costs because you have to keep it cold right but how do you start to minimize that that cost factor

Right. So I would say, number one, the density. Number two is making sure your transition between temperature zones is as airtight as possible. So a lot of times they use what they call like vestibule doors. So basically the product is loaded onto a conveyor. You know, it comes up to the door. The door opens. The conveyor

product is conveyed into that vestibule. It then closes the door to the chilled space and then it opens the door of the freezer and then pushes the pallet in there. So you're creating that buffer zone to make sure that you're losing as little of that cold environment into the chilled environment as you can.

It also helps reduce some of the condensation that you find inside some of the facilities. And that condensation plays a part with the MHE equipment that you have in there. So the more you can reduce that, the better your equipment is going to function. 100%, man. Like with any electronics, the wetter it gets, the worse it functions. Yeah, absolutely. So I guess on that point there on the equipment as well, right, because you mentioned earlier that AMRs can't function yet in a,

freezer type solution right that technology is not quite there so tell us a little bit about from the planning aspect when you start to think about the equipment i mean how do you understand i mean is the equipment at a different level which adds additional cost to be able to to function and last long term too as well in that type of extreme environment

So sometimes with the conveyor, for example, you have different types of conveyor that can work in deep freezer and they can't, they can just work in ambient. So it's really just understanding your temperature zones and playing it out accordingly.

But I mean, in terms of some of the upgrades, I mean, like there's different grease and lubrication that you use in it. You know, there's upgraded motors. Sometimes you have to enclose things in little heated containers to make sure that they're operating efficiently. I mean, there's a lot of stuff that you have to then upgrade, which to your point does add additional costs. But, you know, the benefit is then you're able to get a lot of these people out of the freezer. And so the cost is usually a pretty good ROI. Interesting. Okay. So there's that kind of trade-off in balance. Sure. Like with anything, right? Yeah. Yeah.

So if you're a project manager, for example, and you're looking at your cold storage facility or whether it's a new cold storage facility and you're considering kind of conveyor technology and equipment overall, I mean, what type of factors should they be weighing? What should they be looking at? You know, not just the...

the price at the end of the day, right? But like you said, those trade-offs as well. How do you kind of take account for everything that surrounds that to be able to get the right solution in there? I would say the easy answer is make sure you're working with somebody who's got proof that they've done this in a freezer, right? If they have proof of concepts in the market, usually you can trust that they say they're going to do what they say they're going to do. So I think that's probably priority number

one. Yeah, the R&D is not something that you want to try on the new cold storage or even an existing one if you're trying to add to it. Go with the proven technologies that are out there. And there's a lot of good proven technologies out there in the conveyor world. You know, Gevhart's a great brand to take inside the freezer. It's in there now. It works. It's

Stick with what works. It's not the time that you want to try playing around with something new. No. Not the place to be getting picked for sure. Yeah, absolutely. And I think that makes a ton of sense there. I mean, so on the front, I mean, from a conveyor perspective, I mean, you mentioned Gephardt as an example, but, you know, are there...

Are there actual differences in the technology that surrounds that conveyor in the freezer or they're pretty much the same? What's kind of differentiating? I mean, a lot of it's the same, but again, it's these little modest upgrades that they do, like changing out the lubrication for greases that don't freeze at certain temperatures or upgrading the gearboxes or putting these things in heated enclosures to make sure that they operate. I mean, that's really what the difference is between your typical conveyor because otherwise, you know, the rollers and a lot of it is more or less the same.

right? It's just these little small upgrades that let it work in that environment long term. There's a lot of different conveyor companies out there that do very well as far as conveyors as an overall concept and a function. And technically,

they're very similar. But when you're going into a cold storage, when you're going into the freezer, it's very important that you're working with a company, you're working with a provider that's giving you a solution, that's spent the time and the engineering resources to put the quality pieces in place. The lubricant, I mean, you know, there's different types of Loctite that you can put on...

on different components, you know, different screws and bolts, right? That makes a difference. Some of that doesn't work in a freezer, and some does. But there's companies that spend the time, resources, and money to make sure they're using things just at that level of detail, and others that I'm not going to say that they don't want to, but they just don't have that experience. So it's just making sure you're partnering with those right folks. That's 100% the truth.

Yeah, interesting. And I think that's great advice there. And those little kind of details and nuances in a sense, I mean, can make a big difference. Absolutely. Let's talk a little bit about maybe maintenance in that regard there. You know, if we look at a conveyor that's, you know, in an ambient setting, obviously there's maintenance that needs to go on there. But how does that differentiate when you're in a more extreme environment like a freezer?

I would say it's way less fun to maintain equipment in a freezer as it is to install, right? So there's a lot of trade-offs there. But in general, I mean, it's the same type of work. It's just... Sometimes a little more frequent. It can be. It can be. The other problem is a lot of times these maintenance guys are wearing like, you know, heavy-duty coats and gloves and things like that. So it's just not as easy to be dexterous with your hands and do stuff that you need to do in order to fix things. I mean, it's just...

Think of trying to do something in an ambient environment and then doing it at minus 20. And for those of you who haven't been in minus 20 before, I mean, it's so cold, your eyelids start to freeze over and your nose starts to freeze. I mean, it is...

It's not a fun environment to be in long term, especially if you're in there wearing some kind of suit trying to fix something in a very tight space. I mean, that's definitely glad I'm in the sales side and not in the maintenance side of these things because that does not sound fun to me. You know, I actually came from that world working inside those cores and freezers prior to coming onto the sales side. And, you know, I will tell you, it gets to a point where you can't move your fingers. And

Just to be clear, when you talk about doing maintenance in any type of repair, whether it's minor, major, whether it's just a PM, you're not bringing that room up to temperature in order to do it. You have to do all that work inside of a freezer. And it becomes very difficult.

know there's there's there's a lot of applications out there where you know you even try to tell them make sure you run all your control panels outside and run it through the wall and it's an added cost you know I've been to plenty of sites where the control panels are inside the freezer the HMI screens are inside the freezer and they do it because of cost right but how horrible is it to have to go inside of a freezer to

to operate something on an HMI screen. It's pretty horrible. I mean, it really is. When, yes, it would have taken a little bit more money to run it through a wall and keep it in a cooler dock or an ambient area. But at the end of the day, it makes life a lot easier. So it's just, again, it all goes back to that partnership with the right people that understand the environment. Yeah, you've got to have experience with that, right? I mean, like my previous company, we built a project where we actually had to put a label applicator inside of like a little...

a little heated box to make sure that it could operate. Because again, at minus 20, stuff just doesn't work, right? Little small things like applying a label, but the moment it hits that freezer, it then basically freezes the label so it doesn't stick to it anymore. So there's a lot of things like that where if you're not experienced, you don't have that field knowledge to know when to do these types of things. I mean, it's absolutely critical. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, and I think that's such a great point too. Like you talked about the,

the screens being inside versus outside and even though it's more cost up front, right? I mean, what's like, you go back to the total cost of ownership. I mean, what's the real trade-off there? Like at the end of the day, I mean, is it actually costing you more because now it's taking longer for you to do the maintenance or predictive maintenance or preventative maintenance, right? Yeah, creating more downtime in that case, yeah. Like it's giving you, it's like a short,

cited cost savings but in the long term it's probably still costing you the same right that it would have to put it in the proper place or a better place so so is the technology evolving itself because we talked about you know leveraging some of this technology automation to get like the the

the warehouse labor out as much as possible of the freezer, but on the maintenance side too, I mean, is the technology evolving so that you would see maybe a conveyor is more robust in the freezer than in ambient, so there's less PMs that need to be done, less potential repairs that need to be done. I mean, how is that kind of evolving and developing? Well, I guess as a conveyor manufacturer, what I can say is that

You know, Gebhardt maintains a high level of quality no matter if it's ambient, freezer, or chilled. I don't think there's anything we do specifically to upgrade the quality, per se, of the conveyor solutions. Again, we just kind of add these little upgrades that make the technology work in the freezer. I'll add by saying, you know, you're seeing a lot of

uh innovation in the predictive maintenance part of this field and i think that is going to help us do little micro pms little smaller pms you're not having these big catastrophic failures so you're not having to go in there for long periods of time and fix big things but more or less you know you're

Outside of this, you've got your little tablet or maintenance screen or whatever that's showing you, you know, what I need to fix on what day and when, right, based on the number of cycles or, you know, if that diode or anything is showing some kind of higher temperature or lower temperature or something that's not normal. So you're using these kind of analytic tools to make sure that we're maintaining stuff better, which I guess would theoretically keep you from having to do larger fixes for longer periods of time in the freezer. We'll be back after a quick break.

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Yeah, I think the way reporting has come, you know, just with MHE in general, you know, you always have reporting on your inventory levels, your order pulls, your replenishments, all the stuff tied to the actual process.

The way technology has advanced with reporting just from an MHE standpoint, like you said, seeing the sensors, the cameras, like you can dial into cameras now, you know, inside of a system, you can see the read rates, you can see all this data and use that along with your PM schedule to, you may be doing, like you said, you may be doing more PMs or more predictive maintenance.

But that little amount of time that you're going into the freezer to fix a sensor here or a camera here or whatever it is, the less likely you are going to be spending hours in there because something went down because you had a catastrophic failure. At the end of the day,

Equipment is equipment. It's going to be built, depending on the OEM, it may be a higher quality, just like Gephardt, like I said, very high quality, but it is a piece of MHE, and there's always that opportunity for failure, but you need to decrease...

that risk and by having more of these analytical tools out there, you can circumvent that and be more, not predictive, but you can be more proactive instead of reactive. - Right, and I'll add that on top of that

That reporting allows you to troubleshoot more from outside the freezer. Correct. So you're not having to go in to figure out, hey, it looks like that sensor's bad or something. You can see that from the outside. And some of the stuff you can even correct remotely nowadays because you can dial into those things and make adjustments. Yeah. Yeah, I think that's great. I mean, I think because, you know, we kind of...

I've been talking here, I guess the theme has been how do we keep people out of the freezer? That's right. That's the number one thing. Those types of things, I think, make a huge difference, too, as well. And I think it makes sense to take most of those little small bites out of the maintenance so you don't have to have a huge thing to take care of at once. So we talked a lot about the conveyor side here, and you mentioned the

loading a pallet on the conveyor, going through the vestibule and then to the conveyor on the other side in the freezer. And then from there, we can either do some type of crane or shuttle technology, right? So talk to us a little bit about the differences there and what would be the reason to use a crane versus a shuttle and what are some of the advantages or disadvantages of both? - That's a good conversation for us because I'm a crane guy and you're a shuttle guy. - Correct.

We'll go at it. Yeah. Let's keep it clean here, fellas. It's okay. We're also partners as well. But I would say at a high level, you know, I think that crane solutions are, a lot of times when you're building really tall, the crane solution may make more sense. And I think, you know, I think the shuttles are really the way of the future here in general. I think the whole pallet space is kind of moving that way.

But in general, you know, if you're building to a very tall space, which is important in cold storage, because for people who know it, it's the most expensive square footage in the industry. So making sure you're creating a very dense footprint is absolutely critical. Like, for instance, if you're doing a project at 40 foot, I could probably fit at 120 foot the same storage and a third of the footprint, right?

So at that point, I'm building a third of the footprint. Yeah, the footprint may be a little more expensive, but usually that cost savings can pay for almost the entire project. Like it's crazy how much it adds up and how you can condense that down. And I would say that the taller, the better for a crane. Anything lower or traditional clear height, I think lends itself more towards...

for your type of solution? Yeah, I think the pallet shell technology, when you have a lower ceiling, you know, you're a 30 foot, 40 foot clear, pallet shell a lot of time makes a lot of sense. Even when you're doing, you know, a real tall building, 150 foot clear building, sometimes a crane makes sense, sometimes pallet shell makes sense. It's really the data that determines it. And that's the one thing that I think everyone needs to really understand is

data needs to drive the decision, not your gut feeling, not someone's, you know, not my affinity for a pallet shuttle, not Matt's affinity for a crane. It's what does the data tell us about the product you're putting in and your rates to get it out? Like let that data dictate because there's times I've been asked to quote a pallet shuttle. It's like the data says it needs to be a crane.

because a crane makes more sense in this application and we just need to make sure the data drives that. But when you look at the Power Shuttle, what's really, and I go into what I like great about the Power Shuttle system, for us we call it the RAF, that's our system. But what we like about it is it's very flexible with the amount of robots and if you have peak seasons and dry seasons, you can simply just add robots.

And adding those robots helps you get that throughput. Now, you're always going to have a limitation at some point, whether it's an automatic wrapper. Maybe you've only got one in-feed conveyor, one out-feed conveyor. You're going to have some limitation in there at some point, so you can only drive to a certain point, right? So you've got to make sure you build out for your future, your 3YP or 5YP or whatever your goal is. But there's a lot of flexibility with the pallet shuttle that you really don't get with it. The crane, you're...

you're only going to get what you're going to get when you put it in. That's true. As a guy who technically has both solutions, I 100% agree with that. And that kind of generates another buzzword we're talking about, which is right-sizing, right? Right. Having the autonomous robot type of solution you're really able to build

exactly how much storage you need and then put exactly how much throughput you need by putting the number of bots you need into the solution. So you're really able to balance both of those constraints, which is really what drives automation, right? What's your balance to storage and throughput? And then what's your box you're putting it in? And so that's kind of how we look at that and decide, hey, is this a crane solution or is it a shuttle solution? Yep, exactly. Interesting, yeah. Yeah, and I think it's very interesting to hear that. And I know some of these...

cold storage facilities are getting very very tall right so i'm curious like what's the tallest you've seen so far ah man they're probably about 130 foot i think is the kind of some of the ones that preferred freezer did back in the day yeah i've seen a few out there now at 150 foot yeah yeah they've been uh yeah i would say the majority of them are at least 100 foot plus at least um

Because you need to go vertical. Yeah, 100%. Because again, that cost savings in the construction is really what generates the ROI for the project. Because a crane or a shuttle is not too much faster than a forklift driver. So you're not really going to get a huge gain. I mean, if you're talking a $15, $20 million project, you're not going to bridge that ROI gap with just people. The construction cost is huge.

exponentially cheaper when you do it automated versus non-automated. Interesting, interesting. I love that you said let the data drive the decision. You have to. Yeah, absolutely. So let's talk a little bit about sortation. So is sortation being used in deep freeze or chilled environments? And what are some of the negatives potentially against it or positives?

I haven't really seen much sortation need. I mean, you've seen, I've seen ASRS do sortation from a case picking perspective in a freezer, but I've never seen like a cross belt sort or a shoe sort or something implemented in a freezer. I mean, it just doesn't.

You don't see the throughput numbers. And the second thing is that a lot of the frozen food, most of it's food, right? Most of that is handled at the pallet or layer or the case level. You're not really doing a lot of each picking or things that need sortation downstream in a freezer. You're just not doing it. It's just not the way that product works.

at that part in the supply chain, how it's handled. It costs too much money to do deep freeze just at a case level and case storage for really. I mean, everything is, you know, you blast freeze it at the pallet level and then you store the pallet. You may pull the pallet out and pick a few cases on it and put it back, but I don't see that happening really on any type of conveyance. There's so little need for any kind of e-commerce. I mean, no one is ordering, I mean, yeah, there's some boutique orders,

like Beyonce ice cream that I think you can get that they ship it to you in a little frozen container. But to your point, the point of sale for that is still at a grocery store. And to get to a grocery store, they're not shipping one carton of ice cream. They're just not doing it. So from a downstream cost perspective of shipping, it's just not economical to ship it at that level where it's required to be moved at a sortation type of speed. Interesting, interesting. I didn't know Beyonce had an ice cream company. I can't remember the name of it. I saw it recently as a trade show, I think.

It's probably called the Kardashian or something. Yeah, it's some super expensive pot of ice cream out of California that they're, you know, probably the shipping cost of it is more than the actual product itself. So very interesting stuff for you guys here to learn about the deep freeze side of things and the equipment that's going on there. I think that's like very, very important to understand, you know, not only how can we leverage that equipment to take the human element out of that extreme environment like we talked about, but then also how do you maintain that and how do you go about

setting it up so you can be successful and take advantage of all the space you have, like you said, utilizing that and minimize those energy costs overall. So I really appreciate you both joining me here today for this discussion. If people want to learn more about the CSS industry group, we'll put that information in the show notes. And we will also put links so you can connect with Matt and Steve here as well. So thank you both again.

You've been listening to the New Warehouse Podcast with Kevin Lahti. Subscribe and check us out online at thenewwarehouse.com. Enjoyed this episode? Make sure you are subscribed to the podcast and for more content from The New Warehouse, find us on LinkedIn and YouTube. Links to subscribe can be found in the show notes and for everything The New Warehouse, head to thenewwarehouse.com.