Dairy products: milk, logistics and square footage

At least an “Excellent” rating. On June 4 in Lambres-lez-Douai, northern France, the Jacky Perrenot Group and Candia, the iconic dairy brand, inaugurated a 30,000 sq. m logistics platform targeting BREEAM Excellent certification—the fourth of the benchmark’s five levels. The British environmental standard assesses energy, water, materials and occupant comfort. Located around 30 kilometers from Candia’s Awoingt dairy plant, the building alone illustrates the two sides of the equation historically facing the dairy sector: a supply chain under constant constraints and logistics real estate playing an increasingly strategic role. This type of investment is anything but accidental. “Dairy is a demanding sector with specific constraints. The challenge is to make the right quantities of products available at the right time at points of sale,” summarizes Franck Glasset, STEF’s France sales director. STEF is the European leader in temperature-controlled transport, logistics and packaging for food products, both chilled and frozen. Yogurt, a carton of UHT milk and aged cheese do not have the same production cycles or the same shelf lives. Manufacturers must therefore constantly strike a balance between the volumes to be produced and the freshness to be guaranteed—and rely on providers capable of absorbing this variability without ever breaking the cold chain.

A cow produces milk only because it has calved and its calf has been taken away: the dairy and meat sectors are closely intertwined, a reality largely obscured from the general public. Likewise, before reaching a warehouse, milk has already traveled through its own logistics chain, which is equally invisible to the public. Every year, France collects nearly 23 billion liters of cow’s milk from 44,000 farms, making it Europe’s second-largest producer, with 17Every year, France collects nearly 23 billion liters of cow’s milk from 44,000 farms, making it Europe’s second-largest producer, with 17% of the continent’s collection, Pascal Le Brun, president of Cniel, recalled at the industry association’s back-to-school conference in September 2025 (source: cniel.com). This collection is handled by insulated tankers that travel from farm to farm to gauge the tank and check the milk’s quality before loading. “We make between two and three rounds a day per driver (...) the average distance of farms is 20 km around the dairy plant,” Nicolas Duguet, a milk tanker driver, told the Terre de Touraine cooperative in 2023 (source: terredetouraine.fr). As farms have gradually consolidated and milk tanks have grown larger, collection schedules have also changed: long carried out daily, collection is now often spaced out to every other day.

Between manufacturers and mass retail, pressure on prices is not easing—and logistics is on the front line. “The entire sector is seeking to become more efficient, and logistics has an essential role to play. We need to reconcile cost control, service quality and adaptability,” says Franck Glasset. Route optimization, better vehicle loading and fewer empty runs: the traditional levers are well known, but putting them into practice remains specific to each organization. “There is no one-size-fits-all model. Each manufacturer organizes its supply chain according to its business, products, strategy and size,” notes our interviewee. Some retain control of their warehouses and outsource transport alone, while others entrust a much broader part of their chain to providers such as STEF. Freight pooling is also progressing, but remains contingent on the compatibility of volumes, destinations and delivery lead times. The same applies to decarbonization: since 2021, STEF has structured its roadmap through its Moving Green program, which includes renewing its fleet to Euro VI standards, converting refrigeration units to electric power and optimizing routes. The digitalization of the cold chain has also reached a new stage, with real-time temperature sensors and automatic transport holds in the event of a deviation from the setpoint: an anomaly that was once detected upon arrival is now anticipated before departure.

Long relegated to the background compared with transport issues, real estate is now emerging as a strategic focus. At STEF, the decision was made early on to own its cold storage platforms and warehouses rather than lease them—a way of retaining control over the cold chain and the food safety promised to customers. The group manages this strategy through its IMMOSTEF subsidiary, which delivered more than 55 projects in eight European countries in 2025, accounting for more than 200,000 sq. m developed and 1.5 million cu. m of temperature-controlled capacity. This owner-operator model is also found among players originating in transport. This is precisely what the Lambres-lez-Douai example demonstrates: a new net-positive-energy warehouse, custom-built for a long-standing industrial client and designed to accommodate the growth of a partnership that has expanded over the years to several entities within the Sodiaal Group. For dairy-sector players, this type of dedicated platform offers several advantages: proximity to production areas, energy performance and expansion capacity. Dairy real estate needs cannot be reduced to those of a conventional cold storage warehouse. A cheese-dedicated facility, for example, must manage several ripening areas with differing humidity and temperature levels depending on the rind—a blue-veined cheese requires a cellar with different humidity and temperature conditions from those of a tomme, for instance—whereas a platform for UHT milk or fresh yogurt relies more on conventional temperature control and rapid inventory turnover. This diversity of profiles therefore requires highly differentiated real estate solutions depending on the products and flows involved.

Such projects are still far from the norm, however. Cold storage represents only a marginal share of the French logistics real estate market—around 7% on average over the past five years, according to a CBRE study—and the sector’s history has much to do with it. “The real estate market remains limited because investors have never committed to this asset class, observes Didier Terrier, managing director and partner at Arthur Loyd Logistique, on the group’s blog. Today, users are forcing market players to redevelop this type of building, because this specific activity, long dominated by cold-storage specialists that build their own platforms, is not enough to meet increasingly strong demand.”

At the same time, the growth of home delivery for fresh products is reshaping some traditional logistics models. “It does not replace established channels, but complements them with new requirements for responsiveness, order picking and traceability,” says Franck Glasset. More fragmented flows, a greater need for flexibility and maintaining the cold chain through the last mile are all factors that directly affect the design of future cold storage warehouses. In this area, STEF has developed a dedicated offering, e-Food Logistics, which handles receipt, order picking and temperature-controlled delivery on behalf of food e-commerce players. On the building side, the decarbonization effort is also only just beginning. Construction accounts for around 60% of a warehouse’s carbon footprint, compared with 40% for its operation—a ratio that is prompting logistics real estate companies to rethink their material choices, including concrete, asphalt and steel frames, before even considering use. Automation is also gaining ground in the cold storage segment to offset labor shortages and the arduous nature of working in cold environments. Another challenge is the energy bill, which can account for up to 40% of the operating costs of a cold storage warehouse and is driving innovations such as automated high-bay storage systems and the isolation of cold areas. Combined with growing pressure on available land in Europe, this constraint is reshaping an obvious fact: in the dairy sector as elsewhere, tomorrow’s logistics performance is already determined by today’s real estate choices.

 Sources: CNIEL; Terre de Touraine; STEF, 2025 annual report; SO STEF, 2024–2025 edition; CBRE; Arthur Loyd.