Van-Whole Produce – Banana Ripening Rooms

Given the requirement to continue ripening bananas locally at the facility throughout the duration of the rebuild the project was completed in two 10-week segments. This allowed for half of the ripening rooms to be used as the construction phases were completed. Given both the existing site conditions and seismic nature of the Vancouver coast the design of the room structures were redesigned in cooperation with a local structural engineering firm to meet the stringent requirements.

Project Details:

• MTX office was responsible for developing and submitting permit submission for the tenant improvement. Given the progressive nature of the province of British Columbia some modifications were made to provide better energy efficiency over the long-term use of the rooms.
• The overall project duration (20 weeks) was longer to accommodate the customer’s request for building out the new rooms in two phases.
• MTX facilitated the tear down and removal of the older ripening rooms and prepped the existing area of the facility for the new rooms to be constructed.
• MTX’s team regularly worked with the customer to mitigate any impacts to active operations whilst meeting an aggressive construction schedule.
• The new ripening rooms were constructed with both variable frequency drives and partial loading capability to ensure both energy efficient use of the rooms as well as flexibility for changing load requirements.
• The ripening rooms systems were cooled by a centralized glycol package chiller located behind the facility. Given the tight proximity of the facility to surrounding infrastructure a crane was coordinated with the local municipality to locate the chiller.