Orange-wrapped pallets of products are easy to spot inside a vast warehouse that just opened Monday in Henry County.
Since the newly christened facility is owned by Dutch logistics company NewCold, the color choice is meaningful. Orange is a national symbol of royal pride in The Netherlands, which was on full display in Georgia on Monday.
Netherlands King Willem-Alexander and Queen Maxima visited the Peach State and toured the sprawling NewCold warehouse, a $333 million project that ranks among the largest in Henry County history. It’s also another notch in the belt of two shipping and logistics powerhouses.
“The Netherlands and Georgia can support each other,” said Mark Harbers, minister of infrastructure and water management for The Netherlands. “Transport and logistics are in our DNA.”
Internationally known for its windmills, tulip fields and cycling infrastructure, the Netherlands is also famous as a shipping gateway for European commerce. Atlanta shares a similar reputation in North America as home of the world’s busiest airport, the Port of Savannah and several main railway spurs.
NewCold, which was founded in 2012, primarily operates cold storage facilities that store and ship perishable goods. Its facility in McDonough, located along Ga. 42 about 30 miles southeast of downtown Atlanta, is the company’s first dry-good storage facility in North America and will later expand to incorporate cold storage space.
Jonas Swarttouw, an executive vice president at NewCold, said construction on the second phase will begin later this year. When complete, the entire 820,000-square-foot campus will employ at least 170 workers, many of whom will monitor the scores of robots that do the heavy lifting of carrying cargo to their destination.
“Our industry is adopting automation at a much higher speed than in the past,” Swarttouw said. “We were one of the first movers on that part.”
The facility’s first phase is able to hold 85,000 pallets of goods — packaged popcorn was visible beneath the orange wrapping. Those pallets are ferried around a maze of tracks by autonomous robots and forklifts before eventually being loaded onto a tractor-trailer.
The Dutch royal family toured the facility as part of a planned two-day visit to Atlanta and Savannah. During the Georgia expedition, the king and queen visited the King Center, where they paid tribute to the late Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. They later met with Gov. Brian Kemp at the Gold Dome and with Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens along the Beltline and scheduled tours with the Atlanta-based Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Port of Savannah.
To woo NewCold to Georgia, the state Department of Economic Development offered NewCold a $400,000 EDGE grant, an incentive from one of the state’s so-called “deal closing” funds. The state said the facility’s employees will make an average salary of $60,000, which is more than 120% more than Henry County’s average.
