How much is spoilage actually costing you? And when does a cold store pay back?
Tell us what you store, how much, where, and how you price it. In 30 seconds you'll see the monthly spoilage you're absorbing today, the indicative cold-store capex to fix it, and the payback in months — with a 10-year cash position chart. Math grounded in FAO postharvest losses, ASHRAE Ch. 24, and live Pakistan electricity tariffs. The numbers nobody else publishes.
Your situation
Four inputs. No login. No email gate. Results update live.
Rates as of — · indicative
A small grocery cold room is 10-30 tonnes/month. A district-level pack-house is 200-500. An export 3PL is 1,000+.
Default is the wholesale 2025-26 Pakistan average for the commodity above. Use your own number for a sharper answer — you can enter the price in whichever currency you picked above.
Drives the electricity tariff (LESCO / K-Electric / SEC etc.) and the 50°C-design refrigeration penalty for KSA.
Advanced — turnover & hold time
Faster turnover = smaller store, lower capex. Default is 30 days.
10-year cash position
Cumulative cash position (loss avoided − opex − capex). Non-discounted; the real NPV is usually better.
Honest caveat: output is a band (±25%), grounded in FAO, ASHRAE Ch. 24, and 2025-26 published city tariffs. Loss-avoided credit only — revenue uplift from new export markets or premium pricing is not included and usually accelerates payback further. Site survey + engineer review collapses the band.
How this calculator works
Three numbers, defensible each:
1. Loss you are absorbing now
Monthly loss (PKR) = monthly throughput (kg) × (spoilage % without cold chain − spoilage % with cold chain) × selling price (PKR/kg). The without-chain and with-chain spoilage rates come from the FAO Postharvest Loss Compendium 2011, the Punjab Agriculture Marketing Board postharvest surveys 2022-2024, and USDA Handbook 66 for CA-storable commodities. Pharmaceutical loss is treated as a step function: chain-intact = ~0.5% loss; chain-break = 100% loss (WHO TRS 961 Annex 9).
2. Capex band
Required storage volume = monthly throughput × turnover-factor × m³/tonne (from commodity data). Capex/m³ rate is selected by temperature class: chilled (above zero), chilled (0-4°C), frozen (−18°C), blast freezer (−30°C), CA store, or pharma-validated. Rates are 2026 Pakistan-realistic build costs (PIR panels + refrigeration plant + civil + doors + controls + commissioning) from `data-pricing.json` — itself benchmarked against Izhar Foster's order book 2023-2025. A ±20% band is applied at output to reflect real-project variation.
3. Payback
Monthly operating cost = (electricity: kWh/m³/year × volume × city tariff PKR/kWh) ÷ 12 + (non-electricity: 4-7% of capex) ÷ 12. Payback months = capex (midpoint) ÷ (monthly loss avoided − monthly opex). If opex > loss avoided, the calculator says so plainly — cold storage is not justifiable on loss-avoidance alone at that scale and the engineer should propose a different scope.
What the calculator deliberately doesn't include
- Premium pricing from quality preservation (typically adds 10-25% on top of avoided loss for fresh produce).
- Access to new export markets (mango/dates to EU and GCC require cold-chain by buyer mandate).
- Insurance discount and bank-financing eligibility for cold-chain businesses.
- Solar PV self-generation offset (modelled in Tool 2 — energy cost calculator).
- Working capital release from lower spoilage (significant for high-value commodities).
Every one of these accelerates payback. The published payback months are therefore a ceiling, not a midpoint.
5 questions, then an engineer is on WhatsApp.
If the payback is interesting, the next step is sizing. Our concept wizard takes you through 5 questions about your product, capacity, location, timeline, and contact — then drops the spec straight into a structured WhatsApp message to our engineering team. No login, no email gate, no chat bot pretending to be a human.
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