A 217,540-square-foot cold storage and food production facility off North Mill Road in Vineland, New Jersey, has sold for $22.5 million.
Provender Partners, a Newport Beach, California, real estate company that focuses on food-related and cold storage real estate, bought the property at 215 N. Mill Road from Safeway Fresh Foods, which operates Sunnyside Farms as its fresh foods division.
The property is a sale-lease back and Safeway Fresh will continue to occupy the space. The building was developed in the mid-1990s and 64% of the space is dedicated to freezer and cooler space.
Provender entered the Philadelphia market last fall with the $39.65 million purchase 1000 Coopertown Road, a 255,000-square-foot building in Delanco that is fully occupied by Misfits Market.
In 2014, Provender began to focus on this special area of commercial real estate and brought in Apollo Global Management Inc. as a partner. Then in 2020, Cerebus Capital Management teamed up with Provender to acquire cold storage and food preparation real estate. The company has so far acquired 6.5 million square feet of the space across the country.
“When we got into it nobody was interested in it,” said John Long Jr., COO of Provender. “It was too expensive, no one could figure out rents. We found a niche and made it our speciality.”
Cold storage is complex and expensive and preparation facilities need to meet certain regulations to ensure food safety. Those reasons make these properties valuable, vital in the food supply chain, and make the barriers of entry high for competition.
Provender focuses on the top 25 metropolitan areas across the country. The Vineland property is ideal for its location in the middle of a large, densely populated region and in an area that is rich in farming and agriculture, Long said. It also has access to rail and major arteries, making it well positioned to provide next day delivery service.
“There’s so much food being grown down there,” Long said. “We find these little pockets near population centers that have a history of food processing and food storage.”
Ryan Guittare and Kurt Montagano of Newmark arranged this transaction as well as the prior one with Provender in Delanco.
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