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Air cargo · Cold chain

Pharma and perishables: where the certified cold chain is being built

Air-cargo cold chain in 2026 operates on IATA CEIV Pharma certification layered over Good Distribution Practice, with 2 to 8 degrees Celsius and 15 to 25 degrees Celsius as the operative bands, and it is being embedded inside general cargo facilities rather than built standalone. JFK's $270 million consolidated center includes only 3,000 square feet of temperature-controlled space. The exception is perishables, where Miami's $141 million, 340,000-plus square foot Future-Ready Perishables Facility is a purpose-built asset attracting federal infrastructure subsidy.

Key takeaways

  • Miami is the structural centre of the Americas perishables trade, growing 13.6% to 3,128,165 tonnes in 2025, tied with Louisville as the fastest-growing airport in the global top five.
  • American Airlines Cargo opened a Good Distribution Practice certified pharma corridor on 1 May 2026, running Amsterdam and Brussels to London Heathrow to United States pharma hubs, bidirectional and daily, with validated temperature-controlled trucking through a FlyUs Aviation Group partnership.
  • DHL is building a 3,047 square metre life sciences cold chain hub at Changi Nexus One in Singapore for the end of 2027, with direct airside access, inside a 2 billion euro commitment to DHL Health Logistics under Strategy 2030.
  • Emirates SkyCargo's pharma vertical, Vital, grew 54% in 2025 — the steepest growth of any of its verticals.
  • Geodis opened its first dedicated healthcare cold-chain cross-dock in Chicago, and Frankfurt Cargo Services opened a new CEIV-certified pharma facility at Frankfurt.
  • Anchorage is the other cold node, with the $75 million Alaska Cargo and Cold Storage complex operational in summer 2026, driven by seafood outbound and transfer rights inbound.
The Landside Signal

A quarterly brief on powered land, port capacity and air-cargo gateways, plus the Powered Land and Gateway Pricing Benchmarks data file.

  • Dollar per megawatt and dollar per acre benchmarks by market, with the substation-distance and voltage premiums applied
  • Every committed United States port capacity opening from 2026 through 2035, with cost, TEU and date
  • Airport-adjacent rent premiums by gateway, and the constraint map that drives them
  • The named project pipeline: site, megawatts, developer, power source, status
  • Sources and periods for every cell. Nothing unattributed.

One field. We do not sell the list, and the Signal is the only thing we send unless you ask us for something.

A caution on the ambient cold-storage comparison

The best structured United States temperature-controlled dataset available publicly is dated to the first quarter of 2024: roughly 300 million square feet, about 2% of United States industrial inventory, at 4.4% vacancy, 160 basis points below the overall industrial average, with Lineage and Americold controlling 72% of top-25 capacity. Treat those as the last well-sourced baseline rather than as 2026 figures. Cold storage construction has been slowing since 2025 and the sector is in recalibration.

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The Landside Signal

A quarterly brief on powered land, port capacity and air-cargo gateways, plus the Powered Land and Gateway Pricing Benchmarks data file.

  • Dollar per megawatt and dollar per acre benchmarks by market, with the substation-distance and voltage premiums applied
  • Every committed United States port capacity opening from 2026 through 2035, with cost, TEU and date
  • Airport-adjacent rent premiums by gateway, and the constraint map that drives them
  • The named project pipeline: site, megawatts, developer, power source, status
  • Sources and periods for every cell. Nothing unattributed.

One field. We do not sell the list, and the Signal is the only thing we send unless you ask us for something.

This research was produced by Landside Partners, a commercial real estate research and advisory firm working with owners of industrial land across North America on data center, seaport and air-cargo demand. To have a specific parcel assessed, contact Brad Cohen at Landside Partners.

  • Air Cargo — Pillar: airport-adjacent industrial metrics and cargo gateway rent premiums, Q2 2026.
  • Cargo Airports — Top twenty cargo airports ranked by annual tonnage, with the local land constraint.
  • On-Airport Facilities — On-airport cargo facility leasing, ground leases and authority process, Q2 2026.
  • AI Hardware Air Freight — AI server and GPU air freight volumes and the warehouse demand they create, Q2 2026.
  • Data Centers — Pillar: US data center demand, vacancy and the pipeline that has to find land, Q2 2026.

Published · Last updated