Industrial Food Storage

Via the Dish, Nicola Twilly looks at large scale food storage and transportation.  Here is the description of Kraft's underground storage facility in Springfield, Missouri:

Over in the New World, Kraft also stores its cheese underground—in giant yellow drums, stacked five high, alongside Oscar Mayer meats and Jell-O puddings. Their four-hundred-thousand-square-foot subterranean warehouse and regional distribution center is housed in a disused section of a limestone mine, rather than a natural cave, in Springfield, Missouri.

The mine, which was begun in 1946 to extract agricultural lime and now produces aggregate for construction, is a hundred feet below ground, and thus maintains a steady 58°F—analogous to a natural cheese cave. Some of the blasted rock walls and the ceiling in the Kraft rooms have also been left au naturel, albeit accessorized with special anchors to hold lights and fixtures. But the similarities to traditional affinage end there: Kraft’s industrial cheese cave is underground—alongside an increasing volume of refrigerated data centers and photo archives, as well as food storage—for reasons that involve energy savings rather than terroir. The facility’s manager, Tony Snyder, estimates that Kraft uses 65 percent less electricity than a comparable surface warehouse, even though they rely on a chilled brine pumping system to bring the temperature down to a much less microbe-friendly 36°F.

Interstate-adjacent, with below-ground truck docks and rail sidings, as well as forty-five-foot ceilings to accommodate cranes, booms, and lifts, these kinds of titanic, fluorescent-lit, artificially refrigerated underground caverns increasingly house our food, our data, and our most valuable cultural artifacts. 


There's a lot of other cool information in the article.