Food Grade Warehouse Racking for a Protein Processing Plant: West Liberty Foods

A food plant stores product across ambient, cooler and freezer zones — and washes everything down. Here is how Material Handling USA specifies food and beverage racking systems for that reality.

Frost-covered palletized product stored on selective pallet rack in a freezer warehouse aisle

2024

Year West Liberty Foods worked with us on pallet rack

Food processing

Protein processing and packaging operation

3 climates

Ambient, cooler and freezer storage in one building

Wash-down

Sanitation drives the whole rack specification

The projectWhy food plants are differentZone by zoneRack selectionSanitation & finishFreezer constructionSafety & inspectionFAQs

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The project

West Liberty Foods is a protein processing and packaging company. Material Handling USA supplied pallet rack for the company in 2024.

Food processing sits at the hard end of industrial storage. A plant has to hold raw inputs, packaging material, work in process and finished product, often at three different temperatures, in a building that is cleaned aggressively every single day. The pallet rack systems that go into it are graded on things a dry-goods distribution centre never thinks about: how fast they dry, how easily a sanitation crew can reach behind them, and whether a beam that spent five years in a blast freezer is still the beam the engineer designed.

This page uses that project as the starting point for how we approach food grade warehouse racking. The client, the year and the product category are the only project specifics we publish — everything else below is general engineering and planning guidance that applies to any food or beverage plant.

What we publish

For every case study in this series we publish the client, the year we worked together and the product category supplied. We never publish facility layouts, room dimensions, storage quantities, contract values or anything else specific to a customer’s site.

Selective pallet rack holding palletized food product in a chilled warehouse aisle
Ambient, chilled and frozen zones each ask a different question of the same rack system.

Why a food plant is not a dry warehouse

Ask a food plant engineer what they want from racking and you rarely hear “more pallet positions” first. You hear about cleanability, then about temperature, then about traffic.

Everything gets wet. Wash-down is not an occasional deep clean; in many plants it is a nightly production step involving hot water, foam, caustic or acid chemistry and pressure. Standard painted rack was designed for a dry building, and it shows.

Temperature is a material property, not a comfort setting. A freezer at deep negative temperatures changes how steel, anchors, concrete slabs and rack accessories behave, and it makes every maintenance task slower and more expensive.

Traffic is relentless. Palletized product moves constantly, often through doorways and in tight rooms where a forklift has no spare inches. Impact damage is a question of when, not if.

Audits look at storage. Third-party food safety audits and inspectors look at how product is stored, whether it is off the floor and away from walls, whether allergens and raw and ready-to-eat product are properly separated, and whether the storage area is genuinely cleanable.

Zone by zone: what each room actually needs

The most useful way to plan food and beverage racking systems is room by room, because the same building usually needs three or four different answers.

Dry and ambient storagePackaging, dry ingredients, corrugate and supplies. Standard selective racking is usually the right answer here — the constraint is cleanability and keeping product off the floor and clear of walls.
Cooler / chilledWet, humid and cold enough that condensation is constant. Finish and drainage matter more than in the dry warehouse, and floors are often slippery, which affects aisle widths and travel speeds.
FreezerThe most expensive cubic feet in the building. Density systems earn their cost here, but so does reliability: every maintenance visit inside a freezer is slow, cold and disruptive.
Raw receivingRaw material arriving on supplier pallets in variable condition. Deck levels and pallet support matter because the pallet quality is not under your control.
Finished goods stagingHigh turnover, order-based picking, and a shipping schedule. Selectivity beats density here even when the cube looks tempting.
Sanitation and chemical storageCleaning chemicals have their own separation, containment and compatibility requirements from their safety data sheets and the fire code — settle those before the layout is frozen.

Separation is a design input

Allergen control, and separation between raw and ready-to-eat product, are decided in the layout, not in the daily routine. Dedicating rows or zones, and storing higher-risk items below nothing that could contaminate them, is far easier to hold to than a rule written on a whiteboard.

Rack selection: density where it pays, selectivity where it counts

Refrigerated and frozen space costs several times what ambient space costs to build and to run, so density systems make more financial sense in a food plant than almost anywhere else. That does not make them right for every room.

The decision is driven by how many distinct SKUs sit in the room, how many pallets there are of each, and how strictly the product has to rotate. A lane of drive-in pallet rack is only efficient when one SKU can fill the lane; put two SKUs in it and you have built yourself a puzzle. A pallet flow rack lane gives true first-in, first-out rotation without giving up density, which is why dated product and short-shelf-life goods so often end up on it.

System Best fit in a food plant Rotation Watch out for
Selective Finished goods staging, dry storage, many SKUs at low pallet counts Any Lowest density — costly in freezer space
Drive-in Deep freezer storage of few SKUs at high pallet counts LIFO Lane discipline, forklift contact inside lanes, slower put-away
Push-back Cooler and freezer buffer storage, 2–6 deep LIFO Carts and rails add maintenance points in cold rooms
Pallet flow Dated product, short shelf life, high-volume picking FIFO Requires consistent pallet quality; brakes need cold-rated specification
Double-deep Medium SKU counts where a deep-reach truck already exists LIFO Needs the right truck and driver skill
Pallet flow rack lanes storing palletized product in a cold storage warehouse
Pallet flow gives FIFO rotation and density at the same time — the reason it recurs in cold rooms.

Cold-rated components are a real specification

Rollers, brakes, cart wheels, lubricants and even some paint systems behave differently at freezer temperatures. If a density system is going into a freezer, the components have to be specified for that service, not simply installed there.

Structural pallet rack in a cold storage warehouse with a reach truck working the aisle
Galvanized or structural components buy tolerance in rooms that are washed down every night.

Sanitation, finish and the details that survive wash-down

The finish specification is where food plant racking is won or lost. Standard powder-coated or painted rack is intended for dry indoor service. In a wash-down or high-humidity room, three options are worth pricing properly.

Hot-dip galvanized components are the common answer for cooler, freezer and wet environments: the zinc coating tolerates moisture and repeated cleaning far better than paint, and damage does not immediately become a rust point.

Heavier structural sections — see structural pallet rack — give more steel to lose before capacity is affected, and their bolted connections stand up to impact better in tight, wet rooms.

Open, drainable design matters as much as the coating. Closed tubes that trap water, horizontal ledges that hold debris, and back-to-back rows tight against a wall all create places a sanitation crew cannot properly reach. Leaving a genuine cleaning gap behind and beneath rack rows is one of the cheapest decisions in the project and one of the most valuable at audit time.

Choose deck material deliberatelyWelded wire decking drains, lets sprinkler water through and does not hide debris, which is why it is common in food storage — see wire decking. Solid steel decks are easier to wipe but hold water and can affect in-rack sprinkler design.
Keep base plates out of standing waterBase plates and anchors sit exactly where water pools and chemicals collect. Corrosion there is structural, not cosmetic. Slope, drainage and curb detail all matter.
Label for a wet roomPaper labels do not survive wash-down. Specify labels and capacity plaques rated for the environment, or they will be unreadable within a season.
Check chemical compatibilityCaustic and acid cleaners attack coatings at different rates. Confirm the plant’s sanitation chemistry against the coating before ordering, not after.
Forklift entering a deep lane of drive-in pallet rack in a high-bay cold warehouse
Density systems make the most financial sense in the coldest and most expensive rooms.

Building rack into a freezer

Freezer installations carry constraints that surprise people the first time.

The slab is different. Freezer floors are insulated systems, sometimes with under-slab heating to prevent frost heave. What can be drilled, where anchors may go, and how deep they may be embedded all have to be confirmed against the floor build-up before a layout is frozen — drilling through an insulated freezer floor into the wrong layer is an expensive mistake.

Work is slower and staged. Crews rotate out of cold rooms, tools and adhesives behave differently, and some anchors have temperature limits for installation. A freezer install is planned in shifts around the plant’s production schedule and defrost cycles.

Racking a live freezer means moving product. Frozen inventory cannot sit on a dock while a row is built. Phasing — clear one block, install and anchor it, refill it, then move to the next — is normally the only workable sequence, and it is the same discipline good pallet rack installation brings to any occupied building.

Welded wire decking installed across pallet rack beams with a rack location label on the beam face
Wire decks drain, allow sprinkler flow and give sanitation crews far less to fight than solid shelves.

Protection, inspection and the audit trail

Food plants run hard, and their racking takes hits. Two habits keep a system safe for its whole life.

The first is physical. Column guards, end-of-row protection and bollards where trucks actually travel — doorways, corners, freezer entrances and pick faces — cost a fraction of a damaged upright. Row spacers keep back-to-back frames square, and load beams should be locked so a lift truck cannot dislodge them.

The second is procedural. Walk the aisles on a schedule, unload and evaluate any bay that has been struck, and keep a documented route to rack inspection and repair for whatever is found. OSHA’s general materials-handling requirement, 29 CFR 1910.176(b), requires stored material to be stable and secure against collapse; on rack, that is met through capacity, condition and anchorage together. Rack design itself follows ANSI MH16.1, published through the Rack Manufacturers Institute at MHI, with seismic demands taken from the adopted building code.

Keep the engineered drawings, capacity information and anchor specification with the plant’s maintenance records. The person who adds a beam level in eight years will need them — and so will the next auditor who asks how you know the rack is loaded correctly.

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Food plant racking FAQs

What is food grade warehouse racking?
There is no rack product that is certified ‘food grade’ on its own. In practice the term means racking specified so the storage area can be kept clean and inspected: a corrosion-resistant finish such as hot-dip galvanizing where wash-down or humidity is present, open drainable decking, real cleaning clearance around and beneath rows, durable labelling, and a layout that supports allergen and raw/ready-to-eat separation.
Should food plant racking be galvanized?
In coolers, freezers, wash-down areas and other humid rooms, galvanized components are usually worth the cost, because paint systems degrade under repeated cleaning and condensation. In genuinely dry ambient storage, standard painted rack is normally adequate. The deciding factors are moisture, the sanitation chemistry used and how much impact damage the room sees.
Which racking system is best for a freezer?
It depends on SKU count and rotation. Few SKUs with many pallets each favour drive-in or push-back rack, because freezer cube is expensive. Dated product with strict FIFO rotation favours pallet flow. Many SKUs at low pallet counts still favour selective, even in a freezer, because the labour cost of digging pallets out of the wrong system exceeds the space savings.
How does wash-down affect pallet rack?
Water and cleaning chemicals attack coatings, collect in ledges and closed sections, and pool at base plates where anchors live. Specify a finish suited to the chemistry, choose drainable decking, keep rows clear of walls so crews can clean behind them, and inspect base plates and anchors for corrosion specifically rather than only looking for impact damage.
Can pallet rack be installed in a working food plant?
Usually, yes, by phasing the work: clear one block, install and anchor it, return product to it, then move to the next block. Freezer and cooler work is scheduled around production and defrost cycles, and anchor drilling needs to be planned against the floor construction, which in a freezer is an insulated system rather than a plain slab.
Do racks need seismic engineering in a food plant?
Steel storage racks are designed as nonbuilding structures under the adopted building code, with seismic demands from ASCE 7 and rack design to ANSI MH16.1. In seismically active regions such as Utah’s Wasatch Front, that means anchored frames, engineered drawings above defined heights, and a configuration that is not changed casually once it is designed.
How often should food plant racking be inspected?
Set a routine walk-through — monthly is common — plus an immediate report and unload rule any time a bay is struck. In wet and cold rooms, add a specific look at base plates, anchors and coating condition, since corrosion progresses out of sight of the pick face.

Planning storage for a food or beverage plant?

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Utah pallet rack project: This case study supports our Utah pallet rack design and installation guide and, at the top level, our main pallet rack systems hub.

Storage Built for Wash-Down, Cold and Constant Traffic

Material Handling USA designs, supplies and installs racking for food processing, beverage and cold chain operations across Utah and the Intermountain West.

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