How we Built a Coolstore

You must have a coolstore to be able to store fruits beyond their season. The challenge is to store them in such a way that fruit does not lose its flavor and healthy features, as well as its appearance. In our case an additional problem was lack of local expertise in modern storage methods and we had to find it in foreign country.

So, we started by looking on the web and luckily we found plenty of advice, even sample drawings and photos. For storage methods of kiwifruit we received advice from one of the world's most reputable scientist in this field, from New Zealand. In about one month we had the idea of building and asked professional architectural and design bureau in Tbilisi to prepare a project which was ready in another 20 days. Meanwhile we were looking for refrigerating equipment, isothermal doors and panels which we bought in Italy. 20-30 years ago most of coolstores only had cooling equipments but we learned that for longer storage one of the "new" things is an ethylene scrubber: equipment which takes air from the coldroom, carries it to special chamber, removes all the ethylene and returns air to room.

What is ethylene? This is a gas which almost every fruit emits and this gas can accelerate fruit softening and make it unmarketable. We decided to get one, also from Italy.

Construction and installation itself went quite well and we got a building permit from government about 30 days after application and then it took another 40 days or so to build and install structures, panels, doors and cooling equipment. So in total it took about 4 months and we had ready coolstore.

Here are some of photos taken during our construction works