Heatcraft Refrigeration Products helped a major meal production and delivery company build a $20 million, 56,000-square-foot food production facility in Union City, Calif. The company is an industry leader in providing sustainable and ethically produced, locally and regionally sourced food for the healthcare, education and retail sectors.
The meal production company partnered with Grounded Ventures, a project development and financing company dedicated to sustainability ventures, to form Faber Street Foodworks LLC. This newly formed company purchased the property and served as the project owner and developer.
California Air Resources Board (CARB) regulations phase out the most conventional refrigerants for new installations due totheir significant global warming potential (GWP). Thus, low GWP refrigerants and equipment were an absolute necessity. The facility also needed technology that could operate on CO2. The project partners were intent on future-proofing against hydrofluorocarbon (HFC) regulations and couldn’t use ammonia
(NH3) due to its toxicity and the facility’s proximity to a highly populated urban area.
Creating a custom solution for a sustainable, 56,000-square-foot food processing facility was no easy feat, especially during a pandemic. Heatcraft’s
engineering and application teams created a usecase for low GWP technology by dissecting the end-customer’s needs on equipment, temperature
ranges and regulatory compliance with both CARB and the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA). They also calculated the energy efficiency of the equipment for future rebates and total cost of ownership.
Heatcraft offered a complete, cost-effective CO2 solution to meet all the cold storage equipment needs across function, temperature and pressure.
Though there were strong competitors during the design phase, Faber Street Foodworks ultimately chose Heatcraft based on the right product and
application expertise, responsiveness and the ability to secure grant funding and demonstrate the data necessary for rebates from the utility.
