Two refrigerated warehouses on South Stewart Road in San Juan, at 5900 and 5950, show how fast cold space is going up in this corner of the Valley. The state's project records list one at 105,000 square feet and an estimated $21,700,000, the other a 58,500 square foot first phase at $12,600,000. Both registered in April 2025 and both show a completion date of July 3, 2026. Add a $10,000,000, 64,039 square foot cold storage project on West Hi Line Road in Pharr, and the picture is clear: produce is arriving by truck from across the river, and somebody has to hold it at the right temperature.
A cold storage building is a thermos with loading docks. The shell has to be tight, insulated and sealed against vapor; the floor must not freeze the ground under it; the docks must keep warm air out; and the refrigeration plant has to carry the load in a South Texas summer. Every one of those jobs is less forgiving than anything in a dry warehouse.
We build with cold chain operators, produce shippers and developers who lease to them. Here is how the work breaks down.
Insulated metal panels form the shell of most modern cold buildings, and the details at the joints decide whether the building performs. Warm, humid Valley air pushes vapor toward the cold side of the wall; any gap in the vapor barrier lets moisture in, where it freezes, builds ice and wrecks insulation. We therefore mock up panel joints and penetrations, require sealed pipe and conduit passes, and inspect the envelope before interior finishes cover it. The roof gets the same care: a roof over a freezer room has to avoid condensation and ice at its underside.
Ceiling height, column grid and racking layout are set by the tenant's product. Fresh produce typically moves fast and is held at cool temperatures, and frozen product lives in deeper, colder rooms. Many buildings mix temperature zones. One operator, C.H. Robinson, was reported by FleetOwner in May 2026 to have opened a 142,600 square foot cold chain logistics center with multiple temperature zones near the Pharr-Reynosa International Bridge. We cite it as a market sign that multi-zone buildings are being used for produce in Pharr, not as a design to copy.
The floor is where cold buildings fail quietly. A freezer slab sits over soil, and cold slowly freezes the ground; the soil then heaves and cracks the floor from below. We prevent that with insulation under the slab and a heat source, either warm air or glycol, in a sub-slab system that keeps the soil above freezing. That system must be installed, tested and protected before the slab is poured. Fixing it afterward means digging up the floor.
The slab itself carries forklifts and racking in a harsh temperature environment, so joint layout, thermal movement and surface hardness are specified with the cold in mind. We coordinate the commercial concrete floors crews so that the freezer and cooler floors have separate designs, and we work with the structural engineer on frost-heave protection. These details belong in the earliest design meetings; they cannot be added later without the cost of redoing the floor.
Docks make or break cold chain. Produce comes off a trailer, crosses a threshold into a cooled dock, and goes into a room, and each step should have minimal exposure to warm air. We specify insulated dock doors with shelters or inflatable seals, vestibules or cooled docks, and air curtains where the flow warrants. The inspection facility at the bridge is itself a reference point: the 2020 port-of-entry expansion in Pharr added 24 secondary inspection bays, 13 of them with cold storage equipment for produce, and a 10,000 square foot agriculture inspection and training facility, per a FreightWaves report. Produce is inspected cold, and it needs to stay that way after it leaves.
Truck court design follows. Reefer trailers idle at the dock, and their units add noise, heat and fuel concerns; the pavement must handle standing loads in Valley heat. Our work on truck courts and dock aprons covers the concrete aprons and the drainage that keeps wash water off the road.
Refrigeration and power drive both the schedule and the budget. Ammonia and CO2 systems, large condensers, compressors and defrost cycles demand electrical service that the utility may take months to deliver. We bring the refrigeration engineer in with the architect, send load estimates to the utility at the start, and order compressors, evaporators and switchgear as soon as the design settles. The long-lead procurement log is the most important page in the project binder.
Commissioning follows installation. A cold building must be pulled down to temperature in stages, with slabs, panels and controls checked at each step, and that process can take weeks. Our commissioning and closeout process plans for it so the owner is not asked to take product into a room that has not been proven.
The Pharr Economic Development Corporation's blog reports that Greenway celebrated the groundbreaking of a new cold storage facility in Pharr Produce Park on July 18, 2024, and that Cold Valley Storage broke ground on a 40,000 square foot facility in Pharr on May 29. Together with the TDLR listings above, they point to a local market made up of projects from roughly 40,000 to over 100,000 square feet. Buyers range from a single produce shipper to a developer who leases to several tenants, and some tenants also run food and beverage processing lines in the same building.
That range matters for design. A small building can be a single-temperature box; a larger one is a multi-room facility. Think about future expansion: leave the panel wall and the refrigeration piping ready for a second phase. Read more about the Pharr industrial and cold storage district and the neighboring San Juan projects and compare it with a dry warehouse.
Cost is dominated by the refrigeration plant, the insulated envelope and the electrical service. Per square foot, a cold building costs far more than a dry box. The listings above, at roughly $156 per square foot for the Pharr project and about $207 for the larger San Juan building, are the owners' estimates, not bid prices, and they cannot be read as a benchmark for any other job. We prepare line-item budgets with the owner's refrigeration engineer so decisions about temperature zones, rack heights and dock counts are made with numbers in front of everyone.
Developers who lease cold space ask us for flexibility: panel walls that can be moved, slab heating that serves multiple zones, and power for expansion. Our cold storage construction team prices those options and, for a developer client, shows the cost of adding them now versus later. That conversation is common with commercial real estate developers.
Tell us the product, the temperature zones and the trailer volume. We will price the envelope, floor and docks together.
The state project records for the San Juan buildings show a little over a year of construction, and the Pharr listing shows roughly fifteen months from start to listed completion. Equipment lead times and utility service are the usual constraints. We start procurement and the utility request before the foundation work.
Because cold travels downward and freezes the soil under the slab. Frozen soil expands and cracks the floor. A heated sub-slab system keeps the ground above freezing and prevents heave. It has to be built into the floor from day one.
Yes, with separate rooms, separate temperature controls and, for freezer rooms, a different floor design. Many buildings are laid out in zones so the operator can adjust the mix as demand shifts.
Standing water of up to several feet was reported in parts of the Valley during Hurricane Hanna in 2020, and cold buildings depend on power. We raise the floor above flood levels where we can and provide space and connections for backup generation.
They need the same building permits as other commercial projects, plus review of the refrigerant system and the fire protection plan. State accessibility review applies to projects costing $50,000 or more. We confirm the code edition with the city, since Pharr's page does not state it.
Every project starts with the site, the schedule and the approvals it needs. Request a project review and we will walk through yours.
Tell us about the property, the building, the schedule and the approvals you expect. We will review the scope and follow up with next steps.
