New Port of Oakland refrigerated warehouse claims 20% cost advantage over U.S. port rivals

Lineage Logistics and Dreisbach Enterprises held the official opening of their Cool Port refrigerated warehouse at the Port of Oakland. The opening featured a ribbon cutting with Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf and claims that Cool Port will export beef and pork with a 20% cost savings over rivals at other U.S. ports.

In an interview with AJOT, Dreisbach president Jason Dreisbach, said the new Lineage-Dreisbach warehouse has 280,000 square foot of warehouse, 90 truck doors and can ship as many as 50,000 containers per year of refrigerated containers via the Port of Oakland.

A key element is that Cool Port will have a harbor trucking advantage.

Dreisbach, whose company runs Cool Port on a day-today basis, says the new operation has abandoned the traditional owner operator model and bought all new tractors and trailers. This will give the Lineage-Dreisbach enterprise a harbor trucking fleet that carries 20% more product per container than its rivals in Southern California and at other ports around the United States.

Dreisbach explained: “We have acquired new and lighter tractors and chassis that can carry 10,000 pounds more cargo than older trucks and chassis operating at the Ports of LA and Long Beach. This means that our shippers will benefit from our drayage trucks carrying 65,000 pounds, which is generally the highest load you can truck in a cargo container. Generally, only about 55,000 pounds per container ships out of the ports of Long Beach and LA.”

“The higher investment cost is offset by a giving our shippers a nearly 20% higher weight per container…since the ocean rates are not factored by weight … you can essentially ship the additional 20% of cargo for free,” Dreisbach added.

This advantage allows for higher rail car loads as well: “Originally rail cars were shipping 110,000 pounds of cargo per rail car to match up with two 55,000-pound container trucks loads. Instead, these rail cars can now carry 130,000 pounds per rail car to match up with two 65,000 pounds per container truck loads” to Cool Port.

The result: “So not only are our shippers going to save 20% on their ocean rate, they’re also going to save 12-14% on their rail rate.”

Both the Union Pacific and the Burlington Northern Santa Fe railroads have the rail cars to support the export capacity.

Cool Port is exporting temperature-controlled containers of beef, pork and poultry from the Mid-West farmers to markets in Japan and Korea.

The cost savings will also give Cool Port shippers an advantage they seek to export to China: “Our country and China need each other as trading partners.”

Dreisbach is the third generation of an Oakland-based family business that began when his grandfather warehoused Gerber baby food in 1953.