Cold Storage at a Turning Point: Wall Street Weighs the Risks and Opportunities Ahead

Kathryn Hamilton, CAE for Market Share Blog | September 2, 2026

For the cold storage industry, the past several years has been a lesson in just how quickly market fundamentals can change.

The sector entered the pandemic with strong demand and rising valuations, only to face a series of disruptions that eventually pushed occupancy, pricing and investor sentiment lower. Now, according to two analysts who closely follow the sector, the market may finally be approaching a turning point.

At the CREDA I.CON Cold Storage conference in Dallas this week, an opening session on “Wall Street’s Perspective on Cold Storage Trends, Risks and Opportunities,” featured Michael Carroll, managing director and head of U.S. real estate research at RBC, and Michael Griffin, research analyst at Evercore ISI. They were joined by moderator Ryan Murphy, managing director at Lazard Freres & Co., to discuss what investors see ahead.

The message was cautiously optimistic: The sector appears to have reached a trough, but the recovery is likely to be gradual, and investors will be watching the data closely for evidence that fundamentals are actually improving.

From Pandemic Boom to Prolonged Reset

Cold storage initially benefited from the pandemic as consumers shifted toward at-home food consumption. More food moved through the system, helping publicly traded cold storage REITs such as Americold and Lineage post stronger results and command higher valuations.

But the boom was followed by a complicated reset.

As food producers struggled to manufacture products and hire workers, inventory levels initially fell and labor costs increased. Once those pressures eased, consumers pulled back, prompting food companies to reduce inventories and reassess their supply chains. For investors, the problem was uncertainty.

“The one thing that public investors hate the most is uncertainty,” Carroll said. Expectations for stabilization in 2024 and then 2025 failed to materialize. “Now it’s starting to see that there is some stabilization. So the REIT stocks are bouncing up a little bit more.”

That stabilization is showing up in the underlying data. Griffin said the analysts closely track the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s monthly cold storage inventory data, and seasonal inventory builds during the first seven months of 2026 have been better than in the previous two or three years, although still below pre-COVID trends.

The key question now is: Has the sector truly troughed?

Griffin’s answer was cautiously affirmative. Customer destocking appears to have largely run its course, and both the REITs and other industry participants are signaling that the market may be at a fundamental trough.

“The question then becomes: how quickly can fundamentals accelerate?” he said.

That distinction matters. Investors are less interested in simply seeing conditions stop deteriorating than they are in seeing evidence of an actual recovery.