Americold Middleboro.

Project brief

Americold Middleboro is a temperature-controlled warehouse on Wood Street in Middleborough, Massachusetts, built by the cold storage company Americold for its longtime partner Ocean Spray. The facility sits beside Ocean Spray's production plant and supports the cooperative's northeast harvest, in particular the production of Craisins dried cranberries. It contains three temperature-controlled rooms and a loading dock, with about 165,000 square feet of capacity, and was designed in partnership with Ocean Spray.

The building's design responds to the peak of cranberry season, when large volumes of fruit arrive in a short window and must be frozen to Ocean Spray's standards. Its three rooms were planned to run at 0°F, and the facility can rapidly freeze up to 79 million pounds of cranberries. Moving that much product to freezing temperatures quickly called for substantial refrigeration capacity, which Americold's in-house engineering team designed to Ocean Spray's specifications. It is Americold's fifth site in Massachusetts, alongside facilities in Boston, Taunton and two in Gloucester. Ground was broken in September 2017, and the facility opened in August 2018.

In 2017, while the project was getting underway, BOGZA produced exterior renderings of the facility for Primus Builders. The images include an aerial view of the white warehouse, showing its loading docks and parking set within a wooded landscape, giving a clear sense of the building's scale and site layout before construction was complete.