Cold storage Islamabad & Rawalpindi — built for vaccines, medicine, and the federal cold chain.
The twin cities are where Pakistan's public-health cold chain is run from. DRAP is headquartered here; the national EPI vaccine programme is coordinated here; federal hospitals, procurement agencies, and UN bodies all need validated cold storage. Izhar Foster builds pharmaceutical cold rooms, WHO PQS vaccine stores, and commercial cold storage engineered for the Pothohar plateau's cooler, drier climate and IESCO's tariff — manufactured in Lahore, delivered up the motorway, and installed in Islamabad and Rawalpindi. 2,100+ installations across Pakistan since 1959.
Three realities that shape cold storage design in Islamabad and Rawalpindi.
Islamabad and Rawalpindi sit on the Pothohar plateau at 500–600 m, with summer design ambient around 38–40°C and humidity well below Karachi's coast. For cold storage that means a smaller temperature lift, a lighter latent (moisture) load, and condensers that don't need the aggressive derate a Karachi or Multan plant requires. Designed properly to local climate data — not national-average assumptions — a twin-cities cold store can use a modestly smaller refrigeration plant and run cheaper year-round. We size every project to the actual local design ambient.
Unlike Karachi (port logistics) or Faisalabad (industry), the twin cities' cold-storage demand is heavily federal and institutional: government procurement, the pharmaceutical regulatory apparatus, the national vaccine programme, federal hospitals, research institutes, and diplomatic and UN agencies. These buyers need documentation, validation, and compliance — not just a cold room. That's our home ground: every project comes with the engineering paperwork that institutional procurement and audit demand.
The Expanded Programme on Immunization (EPI) — Pakistan's national childhood vaccination effort — is coordinated from Islamabad, and DRAP, the medicine regulator, is headquartered here. That makes the twin cities the natural location for central and regional vaccine cold stores, WHO PQS-compliant cold rooms, and validated pharmaceutical storage. A cold-chain break in vaccine storage doesn't spoil saleable goods — it silently destroys vaccine potency. Redundancy, alarms, logging, and validation are non-negotiable, and they are standard on our pharma builds.
Cold storage for Islamabad and Rawalpindi's federal, medical, and commercial needs.
The twin cities' brief leans toward medicine, vaccines, and institutional supply — but the full commercial range is built here too.
DRAP-compliant +2/+8°C cold rooms for vaccines and biologics, −20°C frozen biologics, and −80°C ultra-low storage. N+1 Bitzer redundancy, validated temperature mapping, IQ/OQ/PQ documentation, MKT analysis — the standard federal pharma procurement expects.
WHO PQS-aligned vaccine cold rooms and walk-in cold rooms for central and regional EPI storage. Redundant refrigeration, audible and remote alarms, continuous temperature logging, and the documentation a national immunization programme requires.
Blood-bank refrigeration, lab and reagent cold rooms, mortuary cold storage, and medicine stores for the twin cities' dense concentration of federal and private hospitals and research institutes.
Walk-in chillers and freezer rooms for restaurants, hotels, supermarkets, and food distributors across Islamabad and Rawalpindi. Off-the-shelf or built to your space.
Rapid freezing at −35 to −40°C air temperature for meat, poultry, and bakery operations serving the twin cities' food trade.
The refrigeration plant, insulated doors, and FireSafe PIR envelope behind every build — λ 0.022 W/m·K, B1 fire class, made in Lahore and trucked up the motorway.
The technical decisions the plateau climate and institutional brief drive.
Sizing to a cooler design ambient
A refrigeration plant's capacity and energy use depend heavily on the design ambient temperature it must reject heat against. Specify a twin-cities cold store to Karachi or southern-Punjab assumptions (42–45°C) and you over-size the plant, over-spend on capital, and run condensers at a derate they don't need. Islamabad and Rawalpindi's roughly 38–40°C summer design dry-bulb, with lower humidity, is a genuinely different point: the condenser derate is gentler (we apply our standard ASHRAE Ch. 35 factor at the local ambient, not a southern figure), and the annual hours at peak load are fewer. The honest engineering outcome is often a slightly smaller plant and lower running cost — but only if the calculation uses local data.
Validation and documentation as default scope
Institutional and pharmaceutical buyers in the twin cities don't just need a cold room that works — they need to prove it works, to an auditor. Every pharmaceutical and vaccine project we deliver here includes Installation Qualification (IQ), Operational Qualification (OQ), and Performance Qualification (PQ) documentation, a validated temperature-mapping study across the room volume, and Mean Kinetic Temperature analysis where required. For EPI and WHO PQS work, the alarm, logging, and redundancy specification follows WHO Technical Report Series guidance. This paperwork is built into the project, not bolted on afterwards.
Redundancy for irreplaceable product
The economics of vaccine and biologics storage are unusual: the stored product is often irreplaceable on any short timescale, and a temperature excursion destroys potency invisibly. We design pharmaceutical and vaccine cold rooms in the twin cities with N+1 compressor redundancy as standard — a failed compressor cannot take the room out of specification — plus backup power integration, remote alarming, and continuous logging. The capital premium for redundancy is small next to the value and the public-health consequence of the product it protects.
IESCO tariff and the case for insulation and solar
Operating cost for a twin-cities cold store turns on IESCO's commercial tariff, which differs from LESCO and K-Electric. We apply IESCO rates to operating-cost estimates rather than national averages. Two design levers follow: thicker PIR insulation (125 mm over 100 mm) pays back faster the higher the tariff, and the plateau's strong solar resource makes rooftop PV a sound option for cold stores with high daytime cooling loads. Our cost calculator models both for Islamabad projects in its detailed mode.
Get an indicative cost for your twin-cities cold store in 30 seconds.
The cost calculator is pre-set for Islamabad — IESCO tariff, plateau design ambient, twin-cities presets. Select your commodity and capacity. Get a PKR cost band with engineering, civil, refrigeration, and operating-cost breakdown. Rough estimate ±20%; engineer validation before quoting.
Estimate Islamabad cold store cost →Everything your twin-cities cold store needs.
DRAP · WHO PQS · IQ/OQ/PQ · vaccine & biologics cold rooms
Cold Stores →Walk-in chillers, blast freezers, industrial cold storage warehouses
Walk-in Cold Rooms →Compact chillers & freezer rooms for clinics, labs, shops, kitchens
Refrigeration Systems →Bitzer CDU packs, N+1 redundancy, sized to the plateau ambient
Insulated Doors →Sliding, hinged, and high-speed doors for pharma and cold rooms
Cold Storage Lahore →Manufactured in Lahore — same-day delivery, LESCO engineering