Supporters of a proposed maritime warehouse for Portland’s waterfront continue to avoid clear-headed analysis of market demand. Most of the frozen food stored in the warehouse would be trucked in – and trucked out. Tens of thousands of tractor trailers with no connection to Portland’s working waterfront would add to West Commercial Street congestion every year.

In a Sept. 2 article, “Neighbors icy on cold storage proposal,” Maine Port Authority CEO Jon Nass said about 26,000 pallets of frozen food were offloaded at Portland’s container port during the first half of this year. That roughly matches the total count that we, a group of Portland residents, determined from U.S. Customs data.

Those pallets would fill less than 20 percent of the warehouse, based on typical turnover. Yet even that disappointingly low percentage wildly overstates maritime demand because most of the port’s shipping customers will never be cold-storage customers.

Companies based outside of Maine import 95 percent of the port’s frozen food – and immediately haul their refrigerated containers down I-95. As one example, High Liner Foods imports three times as much frozen seafood as all Maine companies combined, and trucks it to private cold storage in New Hampshire and Massachusetts.

The current proposal – larger than what cold-storage giant Americold Realty Trust decided would be a financial mistake – is vastly out of scale for Maine’s maritime needs. Pallets imported by Maine companies – 5 percent of the 26,000 count – would fill about 1% of the warehouse. And that assumes, for instance, that Nova Seafood, one of the state’s two major importers of frozen seafood, switches from cost-competitive storage out of state.

The Port Authority is quick to criticize our numbers on maritime cold-storage demand, but slow to release its own verifiable data. In fact, we’re still waiting.

Mark McCain
Portland, Maine

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