At the Vossenberg industrial estate in Tilburg-North, hard work is being done on a gigantic new freezer warehouse for potato processor Agristo. It will be the highest in the Benelux and no one will ever eat this freezer empty. The building will soon accommodate 42 million kilos of fries, which is more than 150 million portions.
Project leader Sven Gommers beams over the construction site where he sees the 47 meter high frozen warehouse growing. “Ten years ago, our factory near here already had the largest freezer warehouse in the Benelux and it is almost twice as big,” he says.
Many Hungarians are working on the construction site on the Vossenberg industrial estate. They screw together long steel beams with a lot of noise. Other construction workers balance at dizzying heights over the beams to assemble the building like a huge Meccano box.
“It will soon be 20 degrees below zero in the frozen warehouse. Storing the fries costs a lot of energy, of course, but we also save,” says Gommers. “Now ten trucks drive every day to our location in Belgium, that will no longer be necessary.”
When the building is ready, the fries will be automatically loaded into trucks in the factory. A few hundred meters away, everything is automatically unloaded again. Gommers: “No people come to work in the building. Everything is done with robot cranes.”
According to the project leader, the gigantic freezer must be ready before the end of this year, so that the first fries can automatically be stored in the freezer up to 47 meters high.
