Cold storage
Cold stores and fresh-fruit terminals keep the metro’s food moving, and their tote streams are plain: packaging for ingredients and a few sanitation chemicals. The Port of Wilmington and the Pureland cold stores are the centres of the trade.
01The cold chain in the metro
The Port of Wilmington handled nearly 1.5 million tons of bananas and plantains in 2018, which makes it North America’s largest seaport for the fruit, and Gloucester City in Camden County has its own fruit import terminal with cold storage. In Logan Township, Performance Food Group runs about 300,000 square feet of warehouse nearby, a quarter of it cold.
A cold store does not make products, so the totes it sends out are mostly a distributor’s packaging, with the odd pallet of sanitation chemical on the side.
02Two kinds of tote, two answers
- Packaging totes that held an ingredient suit growers and gardeners once rinsed.
- Sanitation-chemical totes need the SDS and the same hazard questions as any chemical tote, and the answer is often a chemical user or a recycler.
03Cold affects the tote too
Plastic gets brittle in a freezer, and a tote that has spent years in a cold store can show cracks that a warm one does not. The grade page for cracked totes and the cleaning guide cover what to look for before a tote is posted.
04Ticket notes for cold stores
Say whether the tote sat in a cold room, how long, and what it held. The desk uses those answers to pick between a growing use and the recycler.
05Post the ticket
?Questions on this page
Does cold storage damage a tote?
It can make plastic brittle. Inspect for cracks before posting.
Which cold stores does the desk serve?
None in particular. Any seller in the three states can post.
Sources
Last reviewed 2026-11-11. Rules change; read the current text before you act on it.