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UpFresh Doubles Capacity with New High-Bay Warehouse in Ostend

Last year's 75th anniversary was not just the occasion for the Depuydt family to rename Fermette Food Group to UpFresh. With a new high-bay warehouse next to its headquarters along the A10 motorway in Ostend, the company's capacity will also double as of 2023.

 

UpFresh is not a food producer, but a fresh produce platform that stocks more than 5,000 fresh and ultra-fresh delicacies, of which more than 35 percent are own brands. With also logistics hubs in Sint-Katelijne-Waver and Barchon near Liège, every customer in Belgium, Zeeuws-Vlaanderen and northern France can be supplied within 24 hours.

To accommodate the company's further growth, UpFresh is building a warehouse in Ostend that is 75 meters deep (of which 52 meters are for storage and the rest for handling), 40 meters wide and 28 meters high, permanently cooled at 4°C. It is founded on piles, and 'inclusions' or ground columns were chosen for the floor slab on the ground floor due to the risk of settlement by underground peat layers. The lower part of the facade is covered with concrete sandwich panels, and from the first floor up, with steel sandwich panels. These are fixed to the floor levels to withstand wind loads, which can be significant in the coastal region. For the same reason, wind girders were installed in the roof. An interesting detail is that the client had sectional doors installed in the building's facade at various heights, so that large pieces can always be brought in or out at the different levels.

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Two parts

In the front section facing Zandvoordestraat, there are 8 loading and unloading docks on the ground floor. The cantilever above it is 15 meters, with columns that recede 2.5 meters from the facade and are placed every 10 meters in width. However, the 21-meter-high columns in the front facade of the upper part are positioned every 5 meters. To support the downward loads of those 'intermediate columns', horizontal beams were used along the length of the building and across the width at the level of the front facade.

The part above the loading and unloading zone up to the roof is completely taken up by an automatic high-bay warehouse. Two 20-meter spans are used here, so that the building owner can use (and thus refrigerate) half of the space in a first phase by placing an insulated partition wall. As growth continues, the other half can easily be put into use as well.

In the rear part, at the level of the connection with the offices, stair and lift cores are provided on the left and right to allow easy access to the five floors. Between the front and rear sections, there is a zone with a system of lifts, conveyors and spirals that moves goods between the front warehouse and the ground-floor shipping area.

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High loads

In that zone, we had to include the possibility of a pallet of goods accidentally falling down, resulting in a point load of up to 200 kiloNewton. Since ordinary vaults cannot handle this load, we designed a cast-in-situ slab with steel profiles for this zone. For the floor slab in general, we had to take into account extremely high deflection requirements. To cope with a load of up to 25 kiloNewton per m2, we used prestressed vaults to accommodate the 10-meter spans.

In the front section, the columns from +1 to the roof are also made of prestressed concrete. To cope with the large wind loads, they are hinge-mounted at level +1, in steel diagonal wind braces attached to the columns with wire anchors and rods through the column. To cope with assembly tolerances, the wind braces are welded on site. We checked the concrete structure calculated by d-Concrete!, then made sketches for the openings in the concrete of the connections to the steel profiles and then designed the shoes and the steel profiles.

 

Building partners: