A United States cool store business at the centre of a Covid-19 outbreak in Auckland counts supermarket chain Countdown as a major customer as well as fast food outlets.
Auckland is now in alert level 3 lockdown and the rest of New Zealand is in alert level 2 after authorities uncovered community transmission of Covid-19 in south Auckland.
The first case to test positive, known as the index case, is a person in their 50s who lives in south Auckland and works at short-term loan provider Finance Now on Dominion Road in Mt Eden.
The husband of the index case works at a Mt Wellington cool store facility owned by New York Stock Exchange-listed company Americold.
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Three additional Americold employees at the Mt Wellington site and seven family members of those workers have since tested positive for Covid-19.
Americold has 160 staff across four cool store sites in Auckland at Mount Wellington, Wiri, Auckland Airport and Manukau. It also has facilities in Palmerston North and Christchurch.
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Americold owns and operates 183 sites in the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Argentina.
Director-General of Health Dr Ashley Bloomfield on Wednesday said testing of all those that worked at Americold and also of the environment of the Mt Wellington facility was underway.
Bloomfield said he was not ruling out that refrigerated products held by Americold were contaminated with the virus and the source of infection.
While that was an “unlikely” scenario the cool store environment was swabbed in an attempt to rule out the possibility, he said.
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Americold’s campus in Atlanta, where the company is headquartered.
Americold works with retailers, food producers, processors, distributors and quick-service restaurants in New Zealand.
Americold managing director Richard Winnall said Countdown was one of its major customers.
He said it was “very improbable” that Americold workers had been infected by Covid-19 contaminated products.
The products at the Mt Wellington facility were all frozen goods, he said.
Some were manufactured locally and others manufactured overseas and imported by sea from about 15 different countries, he said.
He said all imported product was frozen sea freight and could take “many weeks, if not months” before arriving in New Zealand.
Its Mt Wellington and Auckland Airport facilities were now closed.
All but one of its 20 Auckland Airport staff had returned negative tests, he said. Should the final result come back negative, that site would reopen, he said.
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Americold in Mount Wellington, Auckland has closed and the facility is being tested for Covid-19 contamination.
In June Americold said it was investing about $65 million on expanding its Wiri site.
The expansion would be anchored by Countdown supermarkets and would bring much needed capacity to the Auckland and North Island markets, it said.
A Countdown spokesman at the time said it was looking forward to continuing its long-standing partnership with Americold which would help it improve product availability and maintain timely deliveries to stores.
WORLD’S LARGEST COOL STORE
Valued at US$7.8 billion (NZ$11.8b) Americold owns and operates 183 sites in the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Argentina.
Americold describes itself as the world’s largest publicly traded real estate investment trust focused on the ownership, operation, acquisition and development of temperature-controlled warehouses.
Based in Atlanta, Georgia Americold’s facilities are part of a supply chain connecting food producers, processors, distributors and retailers to consumers.
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Americold has a US$7.8b market capitalisation on the New York Stock Exchange.
It has thousands of customers, employs nearly 13,000 staff worldwide and processed 725 million cases last year.
In Australia it has facilities in Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane and Perth.
In 2010 Americold bought rival Versacold International to create the world’s largest temperature-controlled warehouse company.
The deal included $57m for Versacold New Zealand, which had more than 450,000 cubic metres of refrigerated space in New Zealand.
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The index case who tested positive for Covid-19 case worked at Finance Now at 114 Dominion Road, Mt Eden.
NZ-OWNED SHORT-TERM LENDER
Bloomfield said the Covid-19 positive Finance Now employee had contact only with people in a small team at work but everybody in the workplace was being treated as close contacts.
The office was now closed. The company would not comment.
Incorporated in 2000 Finance Now is a small loan lender owned by Invercargill headquartered Southland Building Society, also known as SBS Bank, which has assets of $4b.
Finance Now’s website says 530,000 New Zealanders have used its service in its 20 years of operating.
More than 1500 retail stores use Finance Now’s financing option services including The Warehouse, Target Furniture, Pit Stop, Pascoes, Noel Leeming and Big Save.
In 2017, it acquired The Warehouse Group Financial Services which included the Purple Visa and Warehouse Money Visa Cards.
It offers 24-hour turnaround loans ranging from $1000 to $20,000 with annual interest rates ranging from 12.95 per cent to 29.95 per cent.
It loans to people without incomes, if they put their income-earning partners’ name on the application, and loans range in maturity ranges from six months to five years.
An update on the company’s website said Finance Now had been listed as an essential service and would continue to operate and assist customers with financial needs.
Its teams in the Auckland office were working remotely, it said.
