Merchants Cold Storage has been associated with public refrigerated storage and distribution in the Greater Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky area for nearly a century.

In 1908, a group of out of town entrepreneurs, calling themselves "The Merchants of Cincinnati", built the eight-story refrigerated warehouse to compensate for a lack of space in the city where they could house their transient goods. This 150,000 square foot modern wonder, came equipped with state of the art ammonia refrigeration, blast freezing, and ice making facilities. Its 6,000 pound capacity Westinghouse elevators enable the 100 plus warehousemen to cart freight from freezers and coolers to the outbound carts, wagons, and trucks. The ice manufacturing part of the operation provided the blocks of ice that were used to refrigerate the rail cars stocked with products to distribute throughout the rapidly growing Midwest. In these early days, goods were often brought to and from river boats and barges, to be stored in the Merchants' cold rooms.

Later on, in the 1950's, the warehouse was purchased by a group of three local dairies who used the warehouse primarily for the storage and distribution of the own products. For the National, Matthew Freckling, and Highland Dairy, Merchants' powerful refrigeration system provided ideal freezer temperatures from the proper storage of ice cream.

The National Dairy was the largest of the group and would go on to form the Kraft Company. In 1986, Kraft would eventually move on to more modern facilities and the ownership was once again passed on to a group of out of town investors, this time from Chicago.

It was in 1990 that our involvement with Merchants Cold Storage began. Still running as a public refrigerated warehouse, Merchants continues to provide quality storage and distribution services for local and out of state vendors. Modern equipment allows us to operate the facility with far fewer warehouseman than earlier in our history.

As we look forward to our move into the brand new Merchants Cold Storage in Richwood Kentucky, we look back fondly at the history of this grand old place. We carry on the traditions of high quality customer service and the hard work ethic that Merchants was built on, while at the same time providing our employees and customers all the conveniences of the modern warehouse of the next century.

The new facility in Richwood has a total capacity of 250,000 square feet, with 7,980,000 cubic feet of storage space, and a capacity of 250,000 pounds of blast freezing per day.