HAC Agri, Phool Nagar — Pakistan's first commercial CA store, 3,000 MT with ammonia-glycol refrigeration

Pakistan produces an estimated 600,000 metric tonnes of apples per year — predominantly from Swat and Dir in KPK, and from the highlands of Balochistan. Most of this volume travels to market within weeks of harvest, sold by weight at harvest-time prices. The farmer with a bumper crop cannot wait for the market; the wholesaler who knows prices will rise in January cannot access fruit that was picked in September. The missing link in Pakistan's apple value chain — and, more broadly, in its horticultural sector — is controlled atmosphere cold storage: facilities that can preserve fruit for 10–12 months without quality loss, allowing supply to be timed to demand rather than dictated by biology.

HAC Agri's facility at Phool Nagar is Pakistan's answer to that missing link. It is, to Izhar Foster's knowledge, the first purpose-built commercial CA cold store for fruit and vegetables in Pakistan at this scale — and it represents a genuine inflection point in the country's post-harvest infrastructure. Izhar Foster designed and installed the cold-store envelope and the ammonia-glycol refrigeration plant that makes the CA environment possible. The atmosphere management system — Fruit Control Italiana GAC 5000 analyser, Swingtherm-BS CO₂ scrubbers, Intelligem IG controller, and PSA nitrogen generator — sits on top of the refrigeration and construction foundation we provided. This is a case study in how cold-store engineering enables an agricultural transformation.

Why CA storage is radically different from conventional cold storage

Conventional cold storage slows the metabolic and microbial processes that degrade fresh produce by reducing temperature. An apple at +1°C respires slowly, loses moisture slowly, and resists bacterial and fungal decay for 3–4 months before quality begins to noticeably decline. CA storage goes further: it simultaneously reduces temperature AND modifies the gaseous environment of the sealed room, reducing oxygen from atmospheric 21% to 2–3%, elevating CO₂ from atmospheric 0.04% to 1–5%, and filling the balance with nitrogen. At these conditions, the apple's cellular respiration is suppressed to the minimum required to maintain life — and the ripening process, which depends on ethylene production and oxygen uptake, is arrested.

The practical outcome is dramatic: Pakistani apple varieties under a correctly managed CA protocol hold commercially acceptable quality for 10–12 months — three times the conventional cold storage window. A farmer who sold his crop in September for Rs 50/kg because he had nowhere to hold it is now selling the same variety in March or April for Rs 80–100/kg, because HAC Agri can time the release to the price peak. The development finance rationale of Karandaaz, DFID, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation rests on this arithmetic: post-harvest loss reduction, farmer income improvement, and market price smoothing — all from an investment in insulated rooms and controlled gas atmospheres.

Why ammonia-glycol secondary loop — not direct expansion — inside CA rooms

The decision to use a secondary-loop refrigeration system is the central engineering choice that distinguishes a CA store from a conventional cold store. In a standard cold store, refrigerant (ammonia, HFC, or CO₂) circulates directly to evaporator coils inside the room — this is the "direct expansion" or "flooded evaporator" design that is standard in most industrial cold stores Izhar Foster delivers. It is efficient, well-understood, and straightforward to maintain.

CA rooms cannot use this design. The rooms are sealed. The controlled atmosphere is the product. Occupancy during operation is impossible without SCBA (self-contained breathing apparatus), and even a minor refrigerant leak in a sealed low-oxygen environment is immediately a life-safety emergency. Ammonia at CA room concentrations — the IDLH (immediately dangerous to life or health) level is 300 ppm — in a room already at 2–3% oxygen is an outcome Izhar Foster will not engineer toward.

The ammonia-glycol secondary loop keeps ammonia entirely within the mechanical room. The primary circuit cools propylene glycol-water solution in a plate heat exchanger; the glycol then circulates to cooling coils inside each sealed CA room. Glycol is non-flammable, non-toxic at food-grade concentrations, and a leak inside a CA room is a temperature event, not a chemical hazard. The glycol loop also delivers a secondary engineering benefit: its thermal mass eliminates the temperature hunt-and-surge that direct expansion evaporators inherently exhibit. The glycol buffer holds room temperature to ±0.1°C. For CA storage at +1 to +4°C, that stability matters: a temperature of +4.5°C increases apple respiration rate measurably and begins to erode the shelf-life benefit that the CA atmosphere is delivering. Precision in the glycol circuit is the precision in the product.

The atmosphere control system — what Izhar Foster integrates against

The CA atmosphere management system at HAC Agri — Fruit Control Italiana GAC 5000 analyser, Swingtherm-BS CO₂ scrubbers, Intelligem IG control, and PSA nitrogen generator — is the intelligence layer of the facility. Izhar Foster's contribution is the physical infrastructure that this intelligence layer operates within: the sealed rooms, the glycol cooling system that holds temperature, and the mechanical room services that power and supply the atmosphere equipment.

The GAC 5000 is a gas analyser that continuously monitors O₂ and CO₂ concentration in each room. It uses paramagnetic measurement for O₂ (accurate to ±0.02%) and infrared for CO₂ (accurate to ±0.1%). When oxygen drifts above the set-point — because fruit respiration continues, albeit slowly, consuming O₂ — the nitrogen generator injects N₂ to displace it. When CO₂ rises above the set-point from fruit respiration, the Swingtherm-BS CO₂ scrubber — a potassium hydroxide scrubber that absorbs CO₂ and releases it to atmosphere — draws room air through the caustic solution to reduce CO₂ concentration. The Intelligem IG controller manages the timing and sequencing of all these interventions across all 20 rooms simultaneously, logging the complete atmosphere history for each room.

The PSA nitrogen generator at Phool Nagar eliminates the dependence on liquid nitrogen deliveries — critical for a facility 60 km south of Lahore on a road where tanker reliability is seasonal. The PSA unit takes ambient air and separates nitrogen using zeolite molecular sieves, delivering 97–99% pure N₂ at the flow rate required for room purge and top-up. It runs on standard electrical supply with no chemical consumables and no logistics tail.

Sealed room construction — where PIR meets CA-grade airtightness

A CA room is not simply a cold store with a sealed door. The entire room envelope — walls, ceiling, floor junction, door, penetrations, and service entries — must achieve and maintain airtightness over a 12-month crop storage cycle. A CA room that leaks — even slowly — bleeds the expensive nitrogen-enriched atmosphere, raises oxygen concentration, and gradually loses the shelf-life advantage that justifies the investment. Izhar Foster's CA room construction uses FireSafe PIR panels with full vapour-barrier integrity on all six faces, with continuous butyl-rubber or polyurethane sealant at every panel joint and all penetrations. Pipe and electrical entries use custom pressure-equalisation penetration sleeves. The room door is a CA-grade airtight swing door with multi-layer inflatable gasket sealing — a fundamentally different assembly from the sliding insulated doors used in standard cold stores.

Room airtightness is pressure-tested before commissioning: each CA room is pressurised to 400 Pa above atmospheric and the pressure half-decay time is measured. For a well-constructed CA room, the half-decay time should exceed 60 seconds (ideally 90–120 seconds); a room that fails this test has a construction defect that must be located and sealed before loading. Izhar Foster treats CA room airtightness testing as a mandatory commissioning milestone — not an optional quality check — because the economic case for the entire facility rests on it.

What this project means for Pakistan's cold-chain infrastructure

The HAC Agri Phool Nagar facility is not merely a cold store for one company's apples. It is the reference installation that demonstrates, at commercial scale, that CA cold storage is viable in Pakistan — with Pakistan climate conditions, Pakistan power infrastructure, and Pakistan labour and maintenance realities. Every subsequent CA store developer in Pakistan — and several are planned, from Gilgit-Baltistan to AJK — can point to Phool Nagar as proof of concept. Izhar Foster's involvement establishes that CA-grade construction and ammonia-glycol refrigeration integration is available from a Pakistani manufacturer with 2,100+ installed projects and 277,460 sqft of manufacturing capacity in Lahore.

The 9,000 MT planned total capacity at the Phool Nagar site — if fully realised — would represent a meaningful fraction of the CA cold-store capacity Pakistan needs to capture price premiums on its apple production. At current Pakistan apple production levels, even 30% of the crop passing through CA storage before sale would represent a transformation in farm-gate income and post-harvest loss reduction.

If you are planning a CA store for apples, pears, or other high-value horticultural produce in Pakistan, the engineering is more complex than a conventional cold store and the supplier selection matters more. Read about Izhar Foster's CA store capability, or request a consultation with our engineers. We will assess your site, crop, and capacity requirements and provide a full turnkey concept — from sealed PIR rooms to refrigeration plant to atmosphere control system interface. Also read: CA stores — Pakistan's agricultural game-changer.

Specification context — CA store, Phool Nagar

Parameter	HAC Agri Phase I specification
Total Phase I capacity	3,000 MT (20 rooms × 150 MT each)
Planned total site capacity	9,000 MT (phased)
Room temperature	+1°C to +4°C (variety-specific)
Temperature stability (glycol)	±0.1°C
O₂ set-point	2–3%
CO₂ set-point	1–5% (variety-specific)
Humidity	>90% RH
Refrigeration	Ammonia-glycol secondary loop
Atmosphere control	Fruit Control Italiana GAC 5000 + Swingtherm-BS + Intelligem IG
Nitrogen source	On-site PSA generator
Airtightness standard	400 Pa pressure test; half-decay >60 s
Apple shelf life achieved	10–12 months (vs 3–4 months conventional)