Refrigerated transport specialist, Hawk Logistics, has moved to a new 3PL storage facility.

The brand new 20,000-square-metre facility is located in Truganina, Victoria, and is owned by one of the company’s clients.

Hawk Logistics Head of Commercial, Brendan Russell, told Trailer that its client offered the company a portion of the site for an initial five year term.

“Ingham’s just finished this major site and they’re not at the point where they need all of it straight away, so they’ve given a portion of the site to us until they get to the point where they want to take over in five to nine years time,” he told Trailer.

“We just wanted to see more vertical integration with our customers. We’ve been doing a lot of classic temperature-controlled line-haul work and rigid work in metropolitan areas, but we were getting a lot of enquiries from our customers about what extent we could start running handling facilities for them.”

Russell said moving into the facility was a critical step in advancing into the next stage of vertical integration.

“Rather than being a company that has 100 clients, we’re more like a company that has six to 10 clients and get really heavily involved in their business. And so, we want to be responsive to all the parts of their supply chain.

“Each step one of those steps in the vertical supply chain that we can develop a capability in allows us to get more revenue and demonstrates more capability to be able to help our clients through what they need to do.”

According to Russell, Hawk Logistics has subleased around 4,000 square metres of the facility which features a freezer area, a chiller area and a cross-dock area.

The site also features several solar panels on the roof, along with temperature and energy monitoring throughout the facility to make it as efficient as possible.

“It’s a very impressive site, they’ve done their homework, they’re trying to figure out how to make it as energy efficient as possible,” said Russell.

“We want to manage our growth and do it in a sensible way that doesn’t hurt our customers or put risk on the business.”

Since opening for business in 2014, Hawk Logistics has steadily grown its refrigerated transport operation.

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