Welcome to Zero. I am Akshadrati.

This week, the cold rush.

There's plenty of mistakes that happen and all that.

Produce is full of little small decisions.

If you bat like 90% you're doing great. So I'd say 90% of what comes over here is perfectly good

and then there's always the second wave of our inspections. That's a guy inside a fridge, a really big fridge.

His name is Matthew Derigo and he's giving a tour of a cold storage facility in the Bronx.

Matthew's family has been in this business for generations.

We're dealing with a perishable product.

It's grown under interesting conditions that are all different.

A century ago, they were responsible for the first transcontinental shipment of broccoli from California to New York on a refrigerated train.

Those were the earliest days of the coal chain.

Now, those of us in developed countries countries take it for granted.

Today, three quarters of everything on the average American plate is processed, packaged, shipped, stored, or sold, cold.

You know cold storage facilities exist,

but I bet you don't know just how big these spaces have become. The US alone boasts

around 5.5 billion cubic feet of refrigerated space. That's like 150 Empire State

buildings worth of freezers. And developing countries are starting to catch up. Between 2018 and

2022, the whole world's chilled and frozen warehouse pace increased by 20%.

At a time when ice caps are melting faster than ever,

the number of walk-in refrigerators is also expanding.

This cold rush has huge implications for the planet.

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