Cold storage and warehousing giant Lineage recently opened a 19,000-square-meter temperature-controlled storage facility in Bremerhaven, Germany, providing the firm with a strategic North Sea entry point for European imports.
Lineage Regional Vice President for the Netherlands and Germany Claire Walters told SeafoodSource that the new Bremerhaven facility will serve as a distribution point for several food products, including seafood.
“This investment reflects our commitment to developing cold chain infrastructure that ensures high-quality food reaches more people with less waste. It is intended to boost the company’s European seafood handling capability by serving as a distribution point for global imports, particularly from Asia-Pacific markets,” Walters said. “It was a really proud moment when the new cold store facility was opened, and we could properly thank the whole team involved in getting it ready.”
The facility, which took just under two years to build and will employ around 50 people when fully operational, has the capacity to store 40,000 pallets of seafood, boasts 18 dock doors, and has quay access to ensure that the quality of fresh and frozen seafood is not compromised, according to Walters.
“We previously had a local joint venture and appreciated the excellent infrastructure in the area, but as demand for our cold storage grew, developing our own purpose-built facilities was the obvious choice. The majority of our business here is seafood … we already have Alaska pollock, herring, cod, haddock, pangasius, tilapia, and silver smelt in store for customers.”
Nomad Foods, which owns such seafood brands as Birds Eye, Ledo, Iglo, Findus, and Frikom, is one of several suppliers that plan to utilize the new Lineage facility, with Chief Supply Officer Eduardo Bachiega emphasizing the importance of the two firms’ longstanding collaboration at Bremerhaven’s grand opening ceremony on 3 June.
“Lineage has long been a trusted partner to our business, providing the flexibility, reliability, and operational expertise needed to support the movement of frozen food across complex supply chains. This investment in Bremerhaven further strengthens that partnership and will help us continue serving customers efficiently across Europe” he said.
Walters explained that in addition to cold storage facilities like Bremerhaven, the company has developed a comprehensive range of end-to-end solutions for shipping seafood and other foods around the globe. That includes an enhanced supply chain platform, Lineage Link, which integrates data from suppliers, products, inventory, carriers, and customers in a user-friendly program.
“As the world becomes more globalized, the end-to-end supply chain gets harder to manage, with ever more regulations appearing, so our aim is to make supply chain managers’ lives easier by offering everything they might need to move their goods,” Walters said, who explained that these new initiatives align with an overall shift toward the need for cold chain network providers to deliver not only storage and transportation services but also solutions that enable all actors along a supply chain to navigate an increasingly dynamic operating environment.
That increasingly dynamic environment has featured such challenges as tariffs, complex paperwork, port delays, weather disruptions, and unexpected disruptions, including war in the Middle East.
Walters said each issue that arises has the ability to create serious hold-ups down the supply chain but emphasized that trusting relationships and proper preparation can help to mitigate problems.
“The interesting thing about logistics is that people only notice it when something goes wrong, but we pride ourselves on developing and maintaining relationships and contacts at every critical point so that issues can be swiftly overcome,” Walters said. “Lineage has come a very long way from a single warehouse in Seattle and a vision to transform the global food supply chain, eliminate waste, and help feed the world to a company that has a global future and became Nasdaq-listed in July 2025,” Walters said.
The opening of the Bremerhaven facility took place just before a fire at a Lineage facility in Los Angeles, California, U.S.A., broke out for over a week. According to reports, it has since been contained, and cleanup efforts have commenced.
