Insights
What the work teaches about cold storage, food plants and FRP.
Notes on cold storage, controlled environments and the buildings around them. Written from our own projects, with the outside numbers sourced and dated so you can check them.
Recent notes
01 · Cold storageFreezer space is at a premium. Do not lose yours to the floor.US freezer capacity is finite and hard-won. The most common way an operator loses some of it is under the slab.D.W. Ross Company · September 11, 2026 · 3 min read · 1 source, cited on the page02 · Food manufacturingThe plants going up now are being built to a different standardManufacturing construction is running at historically high levels, and what gets built today has to satisfy requirements the buildings it replaces never faced.D.W. Ross Company · September 11, 2026 · 2 min read · 4 sources, cited on the page03 · Compliance-driven facility needsWhat the sanitation rules actually ask of a buildingMost compliance conversation is about procedure. A smaller part of it is about walls, floors and ceilings, and that part is ours.D.W. Ross Company · September 11, 2026 · 2 min read · 2 sources, cited on the page04 · Controlled environmentsIn a controlled environment, temperature and humidity are part of the productParticle count classifies a clean room. It is not the whole specification, and the rest of it is built into the walls.D.W. Ross Company · September 11, 2026 · 2 min read · 2 sources, cited on the page05 · Food distributionTemperature accountability starts at the dock, and the dock is a buildingThe transport rule made temperature a documented chain of custody. Most of the places that chain breaks are openings.D.W. Ross Company · September 11, 2026 · 2 min read · 2 sources, cited on the page06 · Freezer floorsUnder a freezer floor, the board is extruded polystyrene. Here is why it is not urethane.Two rigid foams that look interchangeable on a submittal behave nothing alike once they are under a slab with frozen ground beneath them. This is a floor question only.D.W. Ross Company · September 14, 2026 · 3 min read · 1 source, cited on the page07 · Cold storageBuild it as a freezer. You can always run it warmer.Converting a freezer down to a cooler or dry storage is a settings change and a cleanup. Converting the other way is construction.D.W. Ross Company · September 14, 2026 · 2 min read · 0 sources, cited on the page08 · Building productsFRP is not one white sheetThe panel most people picture is white, embossed and .090 thick. That is one line on a page with fifteen colors, four thicknesses and a fire class that decides which of them you can have.D.W. Ross Company · September 15, 2026 · 4 min read · 1 source, cited on the page
On the record
We have been saying this in print for a while.
Where the insulation belongs
In commercial and industrial building walls, we like to see a minimum of R-16 or 2 inches. On the roof panel, we like to see a minimum of R-32 or 4 inches.
Why the intersections decide it
Thermal breaks need to be installed correctly, but an effective vapor barrier as well as spray foam urethane needs to be implemented-installed to fill any voids at these intersects.
Where those voids are
It is important at the wall and roof junctures, base plate detail and vertical wall to wall intersect.
Don Ross, then president of D.W. Ross Insulation, quoted in Metal Construction News, 2017 — Metal Construction News, “Efficient Insulation”, July 31, 2017. Quoted as published in 2017. Product ranges move; what has not moved is the reasoning about where the insulation has to be and why the intersections matter. Current specifications are worked against your project.
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