Ask any cold-storage operator how big their facility is and the first number out of their mouth will be square footage. Ours is large enough at Mehsana to comfortably hold 8,400 pallet positions across three chambers. That number is on the brochure. It is on the press release. It is also the wrong number to plan against if you are a customer trying to work out whether your inventory will fit.
The right number is pallet positions.
Square footage tells you the footprint of the slab. It does not tell you how high you can rack, how dense the racking is, how much aisle space the forklift type requires, or how much of the floor is given over to staging, refrigeration plant, and battery rooms. Two facilities with identical footprints can hold wildly different inventories depending on those four answers.
What pallet positions actually measure
A pallet position is one slot in a rack that can hold a standard 1200 by 1000 mm pallet. Movable rack gives you more positions per square foot than selective rack. Drive-in rack gives you density on a static footprint but trades it for slower picking and lower SKU diversity per lane.
At the Mehsana facility we run 8,400 pallet positions across three independent chambers on a movable rack system. The density a movable rack high-density storage system gives you is meaningfully tighter than a pure selective rack envelope or a heavy drive-in layout, while keeping 100 percent pallet selectivity.
The point is that the two numbers, sqft and pallet positions, are not interchangeable, and neither one is meaningful on its own.
Three questions to ask any 3PL
When you are scoping cold storage capacity, ask the operator three questions.
First, how many of those pallet positions are currently empty. Most cold storage runs at 88 to 94 percent utilisation at any given time. A facility that quotes you 30,000 positions but is sitting at 92 percent has 2,400 actual positions open, not 30,000.
Second, what is the racking mix. Selective, push-back, drive-in, double-deep, and floor stack all behave differently for inbound velocity, pick speed, and dwell time. If your SKU file is 400 SKUs with high turn, you want selective. If it is 12 SKUs with deep stock, drive-in or floor stack works.
Third, what is the temperature zone distribution. A 30,000 position facility that is 24,000 frozen and 6,000 refrigerated is useless if your inventory is the other way around.
Why this matters at the QBR
The reason this matters in practice is that 3PL quarterly business reviews tend to focus on sqft because it is easier to draw on a map. We want to push you toward the position number. If the operator cannot answer all three questions above in the QBR meeting, they probably cannot answer them on the floor either.
At Colden we report pallet positions, position utilisation by temperature zone, and racking mix to every customer in their monthly operations report. Not because it makes us look good, but because square footage on its own has misled too many supply chain leads into capacity decisions that did not survive the holiday peak.
A simple rule of thumb
If you are planning capacity for the next 12 months, work in pallet positions. Convert to square feet only when you are arguing with the property team about expansion. The first conversation is about inventory. The second is about real estate. They are not the same conversation.