Zero Mountain Freezes Clients’ Cooler Assets

There’s a good chance your Thanksgiving turkey spent time chilling out at Zero Mountain Inc.
The Fort Smith company handles refrigerated and deep freeze storage of about 525 million pounds of turkey each year, which is enough to feed about 209 million people over the holiday season, said Mark Rumsey, president and CEO.
Zero Mountain operates facilities in Fort Smith, Johnson, Lowell and Russellville, which store a combined 26 billion pounds of frozen products, ranging from poultry to baby food to grape hulls culled from the vineyards in Altus and Wiederkehr. That all adds up to about 23.6 million cubic feet of cold storage space, which earned the company about $34.9 million in 2006 revenue.
Keeping all those pallets at the right temperature — 34 degrees Fahrenheit for the cooler areas and docks, 6 degrees below zero in the freezers and 35 degrees below zero in the blast freezers — requires a precise confluence of chemicals and electrical power.
With energy prices ever on the rise, this can be an expensive proposition, especially in the sweltering summer months. Utility bills at Zero Mountain have increased 15 percent sice last year, said Toni Bell, vice president and CFO of the company.
Construction costs have risen significantly over the years as well.
“Cold storage facilities are very capital intensive to construct,” Rumsey said. Building costs for the Fort Smith facility averaged $47 per SF in 1987. Eighteen years later, the dock at the Lowell facility cost about $178 per SF.
Zero Mountain doesn’t use contracts for storage, as the amount of time a product stays there varies. The average product is there 19.65 days, but some products move as quickly as within 48 hours, while others have remained for years, Rumsey said.
Prices depend entirely upon the type of product being stored and how much it weighs, Bell said.
The top 20 members of the International Association of Refrigerated Warehouses comprise 1.23 billion cubic feet of refrigerated space, according to the association’s Web site. That doesn’t include giant AmeriCold Logistics, which has 545 million cubic feet of multi-temperature storage space. That all adds up to about 1.78 billion cubic feet of space, nationally.

Chilly Reception
Products that will be stored at subzero temperatures must first be brought to just-above freezing. This is because a warm object’s heat can actually act as a layer of insulation when it’s exposed immediately to subzero temperatures, meaning it would take longer to get the product down to minus-6 degrees.
Products destined for the deep freeze spend time in the cooler before being blasted with air that’s 35 degrees below zero.
It’s so cold inside the storage areas that people preparing to travel in the Himalayas have requested visits to the facility to test out their subzero gear, Bell said.
Getting the temperature so low requires significant amounts of energy — both chemical and electric.
Anhydrous ammonia is the primary chemical used in the process. The refrigeration setup at Zero Mountain is known as a three-stage closed loop system.
Liquid ammonia is compressed to become a gas, which is taken to machinery on the roof and condensed into a cold liquid.
The liquid is run through coils, across which air is blown to create subzero temperatures.
This process is the most common and efficient refrigeration system for industrial use, according to the International Institute of Ammonia Refrigeration.

Underground Origins
The first Zero Mountain facility in Johnson came online in 1955. Two caverns — known as Cave One and Cave Two — comprise the complex. The subterranean rooms were originally limestone mines, and became the first cold storage areas in Northwest Arkansas.
In the company’s early days, much of the product stored was frozen vegetables, including okra from Texas. But the business wasn’t profitable. Turkey is what turned things around, specifically Ralston Purina Honeysuckle White, which Zero Mountain handled from 1962 to 1972.
Until 1959, only one of the two caverns had been in use. Rumsey’s father, Zero Mountain founder Joseph Rumsey, negotiated a deal with Libby’s Frozen Foods to store frozen vegetables. To get ready for this, rooms in Cave Two were prepared.
At the time, it was still an active mine, “so there was never a dull moment,” Mark Rumsey said. The room was brought down to the right temperature in anticipation of the new business. But Libby’s ended up backing out of the deal, so Joseph Rumsey called the facility with the order to turn off power to the newly renovated room.
In 1973, Butterball opened a plant in Huntsville and Zero Mountain has done business with the meat producer ever since. In recent years, the storage company has handled all of the fresh turkey for Butterball, which is now owned by Smithfield Foods of Smithfield, Va. Tyson Foods Inc. became a major customer shortly after that. The final expansion at the underground facility was in 1983.
Zero Mountain had a monopoly on cold storage in the area until 1984 when Freezer Services opened facilities in Springdale and Russellville, Rumsey said. Carmar Group cold storage bought those facilities in 1987, and AmeriCold purchased them in 1997.
That year also saw the opening of Zero Mountain’s Fort Smith location. This facility was expanded in 1990, and again in 1996.
In 2000, the company added 17,500 SF for Fayetteville-based Twin Rivers Group, which was its last addition. Much of the 5.5 million cubic feet at the Fort Smith facility is full for the better part of the year.
The determining factor in whether the facilities are at capacity is not weight, but the total mass of the products being stored. A facility might be full at 130 million pounds one month, and 180 million pounds the next, Bell said.
The Russellville facility was opened in 1993, and was primarily used to store fully packaged foods ready to hit grocery store shelves. Within seven years of opening, the complex had doubled in size.

Rapid Recall
Many years ago, it was up to each freezer manager to keep track of product location at Zero Mountain. Now, there are wireless devices aboard every forklift to tell the driver what to pick up and where to find it, Rumsey said.
Production codes on the outer cases provide workers with data that can be used to tell exactly when the product was packaged, right down to the hour.
This kind of accuracy can be critical in the case of a food recall. Zero Mountain has developed tracking software that is so precise it can be used to stop shipment of product within seconds. The company has actually never had a recall that took more than 37 seconds to secure, Rumsey said.
In March 2003, Rumsey and his son were on their way back from Denver when his cell phone rang. There was a fire at the Johnson facility in Cave One.
Rumsey immediately remembered another fire, which smoldered for almost a year, at an underground cold storage facility near Kansas City several years before.
The Zero Mountain blaze wasn’t nearly that catastrophic, though. Roughly 460,000 pounds of turkey were affected, although 11.6 million pounds ended up in the landfill. No one was hurt, and the fire burned up all the available oxygen in about two hours. The structure sustained no real damage because it is a cave. But the cause of the fire was never determined despite extensive investigation.
The cold storage business can be stressful, Rumsey said.
“It can turn your hair gray,” he said. “Or make it fall out completely.”