The building at 1591 Innovation Blvd. will have temperature capabilities of 40 degrees to negative 20 degrees, along with 50-foot freezer clear heights, according to the announcement. It’s being built on speculation, meaning no tenants are lined up yet. CBRE’s Jason Lev and Jimmy Kowalczyk and Aquila’s Omar Nasser are brokers on the project.
“Cold Storage demand has outpaced availability in the area,” Lev said in a statement. “The population growth and lack of cold storage availability has created an environment ideal for a speculative development in Hutto. Shifting consumer habits are ensuring demand for this product type will only grow down the line.”
Other businesses in the Titan Innovation Business Park include logistics company DB Schenker and manufacturers Paradigm Manufacturing Inc., Kval Inc. and Ovivo Inc. and tech company BryComm LLC.
“We are excited to partner with Sansone, leveraging their extensive experience in cold storage with our expertise in the Austin market, to bring one of the first cold storage speculative buildings to the Austin MSA,” Joe Iannacone, the Austin-based partner for Titan, said in a statement.
Demand for cold storage in Central Texas is high, especially as Austin becomes a hotbed for consumer packaged goods startups. There currently aren’t enough cold storage facilities to meet the need, and cold storage is a niche of the industrial real estate market that’s heating up as food production and supply-chain needs, including the growth of online grocery shopping, are bolstering the space. The booming life sciences market also has spurred demand because many biopharmaceutical products, including the Covid-19 vaccine, need to be stored in extremely cold environments.
More cold storage will be coming online in the metro, such as the 310,000-square-foot RealCold facility slated to open in Lockhart in 2025. That’s part of a $1 billion bet by New York-based Related Cos., which is planning additional facilities across the country in the coming years.
Triple Temp Cold Storage LLC recently opened its doors in Round Rock. The cold storage facility, which has been in the works for several years, is roughly 125,000 square feet and can store product for about 100 to 200 companies. On average, it can house about 23,000 pallets of products, said Michael Angelo Renna Jr., president of Triple Temp Storage.
That wave will soon hit Hutto, which is emerging as an industrial hub. It has a population of about 37,000 people and is about 30 miles northeast of Austin. The Austin Business Journal recently detailed a wave of planned development in the city’s megasite, a 1,400-acre assemblage of land along U.S. Route 79, that includes large industrial buildings, flex office buildings and data centers.
