Bellingham Cold Storage is a pillar on working waterfront
Iconic. Vibrant. Historic. Futuristic. Bellingham Cold Storage, a fixture on Bellingham’s working waterfront for almost 80 years, is all of these.
BCS is a cold storage and frozen food processing company that started as a local endeavor in 1946 and grew into a global company with local, regional, and international customers.
How big is it?
Numbers tell the story. Today BCS has:
- four campuses between Vancouver and Seattle with a total of 26 warehouses and 13 on-site processing customers or tenants, on more than 56 acres of facilities;
- 19.5 million cubic feet of refrigerated space, counting the new addition of 227,000 square feet added in 2024 to its Burlington location;
- logistics that include rail service and a 900-foot deepwater dock;
- 200 employees, with 175 of those at the two Bellingham locations. Total employment including on-site customers/tenants is 1,200 year-round and 1,750 during peak season;
- and flow-through of more than 750 million pounds of product annually.
Really, how big?
Another way to sense the scale is to picture every semitruck that’s loaded or unloaded at BCS in a year, parked end to end. “They would extend south from Bellingham to Seattle, then east to Boston and back to Chicago,” said President and CEO Doug Thomas. “That’s a traffic jam!”
BCS employees pick up and put down over three billion pounds of product each year including initial harvest receiving, freezing, placing in the warehouse, returning product to value-added processing on-site, and again to the warehouse before eventual distribution to points around the globe by truck, ship or rail, Thomas said. About 45 percent of that is seafood; 35 percent is fruit and vegetables; and the rest is cheese, ice cream, pet food, bakery, and other goods.
Walk into the soaring space of a BCS warehouse, this one for dry storage, and get another sense of scale. A single bag of oats is the size of a small car, and these massive bags are palleted aisle after aisle, nearly to the ceiling.
More than 600 BCS customers store ingredients here. “Every customer has at least 20 items and some have hundreds of items,” Thomas said. Chia seeds, nuts, soups, sauces, tanks of honey, freeze-dried oysters and clams, salts, sugars, whey, packaging supplies… “a multitude of things,” Thomas said, waving a hand toward a huge pallet of glass peanut butter jars. Bar codes keep track of every item, so product is rotated and nothing gets forgotten.
Oats? Isn’t BCS all about ice? and fish?
In the 1940s, Arch Talbot was the owner of a shipyard on Bellingham’s waterfront that built wooden-hull minesweepers for the military. With the close of World War II, he constructed an 18,000-square-foot warehouse and Ice House to provide cold storage for local fishermen and farmers.
That initial warehouse is still in service. (Take care of things and they last, Thomas points out.) The Ice House, rebuilt in 2012, is a modern wonder. Enter its upper level and it is suddenly winter, a clear, cold, indoors kind of winter, with glittering ice crystals sparkling in the air. Below, see the huge, flat containers of flake ice that are auto-raked smooth. At 20 degrees Fahrenheit, the flakes stay perfect, neither melting nor melding into a mass of snow. Above, see pipes that carry the air-driven ice flakes out of the building directly into the holds of fishing vessels at the dock. (Before 2012, this was done by moving 315-pound blocks of ice into a grinder above the fishing vessel.)
Today the Ice House, tended by technicians in a comfortable control room aglow with computer screens, can produce 530 tons of ice daily, much more than previously produced manually. Ice is required for initial harvest preservation; for product that is processed before shipping fresh or freezing for longer term storage; and for outbound fresh shipments, Thomas said.
Technicians also tend computers that show temperatures in the Fish House, which can process 200,000 pounds of salmon, fresh to frozen, daily. Totes of fish from fishing vessels are tipped onto multi-level conveyor belts that gradually lower their load from 35 degrees to minus-10 degrees.
BCS is historic, yet futuristic in equipment and outlook. “We recently completed a 50-year lease extension with the Port of Bellingham for our Squalicum Waterway facility, which will take us to 2074, or 128 years on Bellingham Bay,” Thomas said. “That allows us to make long-term capital investments, now that we have a lease that extends beyond the useful life of most new projects. We are excited about that prospect and are busy planning next steps.”
BCS remains a privately held company, with an historic Seattle-based company, Joshua Green Corporation, as more than 60 percent majority owner, and Stowe Talbot and Doug Thomas minority owners.
Justifiably
Thomas has worked at BCS for 32 years and counting. When asked what he’s proudest of, he speaks of the legacy of the Talbot and Thomas families, highlighting devotion to employees, customers, service partners, and community. “I’m proud of the way our leaders have represented BCS while serving on various local, state, national and international boards, and committees. I’m proud of the leading-edge initiatives that our teams have navigated including energy, health care, software, KPIs (see sidebar), ship loading, life safety, employee working environment and now automation. I’m proud of the positive and credible reputation BCS has for being fair, following through with commitments, and being compassionate and accommodating to our employees and customers when they need us most. I’m proud to have been associated with Archie, Jim, Jane, and Stowe Talbot and certainly I may be most proud of my father, Stew who was our CEO for 13 years before me and continues to serve on our board of directors (50 years in April 2024).
“I like that our employees can live in this great community and have a reasonable commute to work and have a great place to raise a family.”
BCS donates to more than 70 charities, mostly local, emphasizing young children, for example the YWCA’s service to single mothers. As Thomas said, “The moms there with young kids need some help. You’re better off investing in kids between ages 0 and 6 than you are trying to catch up when they’re 18 or 20.”
As for employees, Thomas walks the walk. When Thomas took this reporter through BCS’s cavernous indoor loading dock, an employee approached Thomas to thank him for donating Thomas’s own sick time to the employee so the employee could travel out of state for a family emergency.
As for community, Thomas and BCS are founding members of Whatcom Business Alliance, formed decades ago to support good businesses, meaning “businesses in compliance with regulations, that are responsible, where employees are proud to work,” Thomas said. WBA, publisher of this magazine, advocates for those businesses and tells their stories: how they contribute to the tax base, to the Boys and Girls Club, to the hospital, and more.
It's all part of what makes this steady pillar of the community both vibrant and iconic.
