Cold storage warehousing has no affordable tier between garage and industrial

Small ice cream brands producing 500-5,000 pints per month face a dead zone in cold storage infrastructure. Home chest freezers max out at around 200 pints and cannot maintain the required -20F consistently. Commercial cold storage facilities require minimum commitments of 10-20 pallets (5,000-10,000+ pints) and charge $2,000-$5,000/month for the space, plus per-pallet-in and per-pallet-out handling fees. One ice cream company (Humphrey Slocombe) reported spending as much on cold storage as on production itself. This forces small brands into an impossible choice: understock and constantly run out of inventory, overproduce and pay for warehouse space they cannot afford, or rent commercial kitchen freezer time at $50-$100/hour. The reason this gap persists is that cold storage facilities are capital-intensive ($200-$400/sq ft to build), making it uneconomical for warehouse operators to serve small tenants. The U.S. needs an estimated 1 billion additional square feet of warehouse space and 50,000 new warehouses, but investment flows to large-scale operations serving major CPG brands, not to the shared-kitchen model that small frozen food brands need.