All of Rotella Italian Bakery’s products are frozen, and since the company maxed out its onsite 3,500 pallet freezer in 1994, it has used third-party cold storage facilities across Omaha to store its products. While the family had batted around the idea of building its own cold storage facility, the pandemic solidified the need. For the first time in Rotella’s history, the company was having issues maintaining its 99% fulfillment rate because of lack of space in those cold storage facilities. 

“We made the product; sent it to our third-party logistics, but we couldn’t fulfill the trucks fast enough to get it to them,” John Rotella, general manager, explained. 

It was obvious that to take control of their customer service, the Rotellas needed to bring cold storage under the umbrella of its business. John Rotella worked on the project for four or five years, designing different concepts onsite at the company’s main campus of bakeries or renovating an existing building. 

“As I was touring the country, looking at different cold storage facilities, I came to the realization that we needed to build something that’s going to take us from year one to year 10,” he said. 

The company bought 48 acres outside of Omaha, just a few minutes from the main campus, and in November 2022, Rotella’s started construction. In May of this year, the storage facility was complete: 245,000 square feet on 16 acres amounting to 20,000 pallet positions. The full site can handle tripling that capacity with future construction and development. 

“You want to build things that you’re able to grow into,” John Rotella said. “We have to be able to grow over the next 10 to 15 to 20 years.” 

The major benefit to owning its own cold storage facility is not just keeping storage and distribution 100% in-house, but it also operates 24 hours a day seven days a week, just like the company’s five bakery facilities. Currently, the cold storage facility operates two 8-hour shifts seven days a week with 120 employees, but once all third-party storage facilities are phased out, Rotella’s will add that third 8-hour shift to cold storage. 

The Rotellas worked with Tippmann Group to design the cold storage facility that also houses offices and meeting spaces. The dock has 40 doors for semi-trailer trucks collecting products for distribution and sits at a cool 36˚F, and different levels of the freezer itself remain at 0˚F and -10˚F. Inside the freezer, racks of product stretch 400 feet long and 65 feet tall. Turret systems that workers drive through the freezer are completely enclosed with an interior temperature of a balmy 65˚F to keep employees comfortable and safe. The team picks trays and sends full pallets in and out of the facility on trucks out the dock doors that line one wall of the facility.

“It’s a semi-automated process,” John Rotella explained. “The reason we did a semi-automated process is to provide redundancy in case anything goes down. I’ve seen a lot of fully automated facilities in the industry, but I wanted that redundancy in case of equipment breakdown because being from the bakery world, I’ve seen how often equipment can break down. It’s always good to have a plan B.” 

The greatest challenge of starting up the cold storage facility was integrating the software system with the company’s existing system. Rotella’s is using a new warehouse management platform to handle the cold storage facility and distribution, and the IT team had to integrate it with the existing system at the main campus. John Rotella said with the new bakery being built across the street, they worked with the county to run fiber underground, which will eventually connect the two facilities and streamline their data storage and software systems. 

Today, there are still some Rotella products at third-party facilities, and the company is slowly diminishing that inventory. John Rotella anticipates the cold storage facility will serve as the company’s only cold storage by January 2025. Everything is already planned for phase two, building the second facility to expand when needed. John Rotella estimated that it could be ready to go in four months if needed.

This article is an excerpt from the December 2024 issue of Baking & Snack. To read the entire feature on Rotella's Italian Bakery, click here.