Cold Box Express was recently featured on Alabama local news website AL.com promoting their battery operated, ‘active’ temperature controlled full pallet shipper produced in their Arab, AL based manufacturing facility.
Arab’s Cold Box Express has been fully operational for about a year, and interest is growing in the company, which rents climate-controlled shipping containers from depot sites around the country.
Think of it as a U-Haul for a very sophisticated refrigerator. The Cold Box is a one-ton shipping container with about 60 cubic feet of space inside.
Made of aluminum and molded plastics, it can maintain a temperature of anywhere from 10 below zero to 140 degrees Fahrenheit for up to five days without recharging. That means items meant to stay cold will do so, and payloads with specific temperature requirements won’t freeze in winter transport.
Cold Box has an active temperature control system, meaning it doesn’t use dry ice. It also doesn’t involve any exhaust emissions. Running on internal batteries, the Cold Box’s temperature can be customized for any client and is tracked and monitored around the country by GPS and cellular connectivity. It also has security measures.
It is designed to hold a standard 40 by 48 inch pallet. An alternative to shipping in refrigerated trucks, the Cold Box can be recharged on standard power outlets and carried by forklift or pallet jack.
The company offers daily rentals of about $240 a day, varying according to the weight and size of cargo. Month-to-month and longer term leases are available, and the company has a network of 20 sites around the country to allow for economical shipping.
“Our aim is to deliver a unit to a customer within one day,” CEO Foster McDonald said. “And we can do that pretty effectively.”
The Cold Box was developed in Texas, but McDonald’s company bought the technology and spent more than a year on fine-tuning the design and setting up a nationwide rental network, he said. It took some time to hone the container, making it sturdy and resistant to the worst a forklift operator can dish out.
“Getting it right was not that simple,” he said. “Everything we did was about maintaining efficiency, reliability and ruggedness.”
A native of Arab, McDonald and his late father Sid, started the company before Sid’s death in 2015. Sid was a well-known telecommunications businessman, establishing Deltacom Long Distance Services in the early 1980s and serving as chairman of Intergraph Corp.’s board of directors.
“This is home,” Foster said. “I grew up here.”
So far, clients have included food service, pharmaceuticals, the medical industry, chemical companies and the oil services business. For pharmaceuticals, Cold Box works in keeping chemical components at the right temperature, and documenting those temps for the journey in keeping with federal regulations.
McDonald said the company is looking at expanding to international markets, as well as making inroads into the defense market. For example, Cold Box can be used to store and dispense cold water, and the company has played around with a tap concept on the door which could be used for beverages.
“Every time we turn around, there’s a new application that’s possible,” he said. “Our challenge is staying focused.”