The opportunity
Brivio & Viganò is a leading Italian distributor of fruit and vegetables, fresh products, meat and canned goods. It operates throughout Italy via an extensive logistics network, comprising company-owned warehouses and transit points. The company required a new controlled-temperature, strategically located hub in the greater Milan area.
The challenge
Prologis had to find and acquire a plot of land that met Brivio & Viganò’s requirements and develop a 30,000 square metre Class-A, build-to-suit facility. The new platform also had to fulfil the customer’s sustainability goals and technological criteria. Together with the customer, a site was identified in the Pozzuolo Martesana municipality, near the A58 external Milan ring road and Bre.Be.Mi motorway, a strategic location ideally suited to serving the areas in and around the cities of Milan, Bergamo and Brescia.
The solution
Working side-by-side with the customer throughout the process to meet its stringent design criteria and specific workflow requirements, Prologis developed a cross-dock platform able to meet the current and future needs of the food industry. Built in line with LEED® Gold standards in just under nine months, the facility offers maximum operational efficiency and versatility.
The logistics hub includes storage facilities extending over 29,600 square metres, along with 2,100 square metres of office space. It also houses independently controlled refrigerated cells that can maintain temperatures in a range from -27 to +8 degrees Celsius, depending on the product type. The frozen foods section occupies 11,700 square metres, while fresh fruit and vegetable produce is stored in the remaining 10,500 square metres. The beam height is 12 metres in non-refrigeration cell areas, thus allowing the storage of a greater number of pallets than a standard 10-metre-high structure. In fact, the beam height is more than 10 metres, even in the areas with refrigeration cells. The fresh produce section can accommodate 31,000 standard pallets. The storage areas are highly flexible and can be easily reconfigured to meet the needs of new customers or be adapted for new business opportunities.
The technical specifications for the cold rooms required a careful analysis of the building's airflows and joints, with the installation of special insulating membranes under the refrigeration systems and dustproofing of the flooring. The building also has an advanced tri-generation or combined cooling, heat and power (CCHP) plant for energy generation, while the portion of the roof above the 2,100 square metres of office space is equipped with solar panels.
The takeaway
Prologis serves a broad range of customer needs: from acquiring land to developing highly customised build-to-suit facilities that meet stringent requirements. “We needed to identify a strategic location and develop our first state-of-the art, sustainable BTS logistics platform that is capable of meeting the needs of our current food industry customers, as well as provide us with new business opportunities”, commented Efrem Terraneo, Project Manager at Brivio & Viganò.