An Omaha-based company plans to build what it describes as the largest privately owned refrigeration facility in the Southeast at the east end of old Deer River Road on Hollingers Island in south Mobile County.
Millard Refrigeration’s 180,000-square-foot operation represents an investment of about $27 million and is expected to employ roughly 200 workers. Company officials say the plant should open sometime in the summer or fall of next year.
Frozen chicken, and where it is going
The facility is designed to handle international shipments of frozen chicken, primarily bound for the countries of the former Soviet bloc — a trade that has grown substantially since the early 1990s and that runs heavily through Gulf Coast ports.
American poultry producers, who sell far more white meat domestically than dark, have found a durable export market for leg quarters and other dark-meat cuts in Eastern Europe and Russia. Moving that product requires a cold chain that does not break between the processing plant and the ship, and that is precisely the gap a facility of this size is built to fill: a place where truckloads arriving from poultry plants across the region can be consolidated, held at temperature and loaded into refrigerated containers for the ocean voyage.
Millard Refrigerated Services has spent the past 40 years designing, building and operating temperature-controlled warehouses and distribution centers. A plant of this scale on Hollingers Island places that capacity within a short haul of the state docks.
Why the location matters
Hollingers Island sits in the industrial band along the western shore of Mobile Bay in south Mobile County, an area already given over to heavy industry, marine terminals and the infrastructure that serves them. The site’s value lies in its proximity: to the Port of Mobile, to Interstate 10, and to the poultry-producing interior of Alabama, Mississippi and Georgia.
For south Mobile County, the project represents the kind of investment local officials have long sought — capital-intensive, tied to the port, and generating jobs in warehousing, logistics and transportation rather than in a single volatile industry.
Two hundred jobs and $27 million will not by themselves reverse the county’s economic trajectory. But the plant is a bet on the Port of Mobile’s role as an export gateway, and it is the sort of bet that tends to attract others. Cold storage capacity, once built, draws the shippers who need it, and the shippers in turn draw the truck traffic, the freight forwarders and the container lines that make a port more valuable to the next company deciding where to put its money.