Misfits Market Project Sparks Growth with Metl-Span’s Insulated Metal Panels

When it comes to healthy, organically grown produce, many consumers don’t care much about how their zucchinis and oranges may look. What really matters to is affordability and freshness.

That’s why boxes and boxes of misshapen produce fly off the shelves at Misfits Market, which offers a subscription-based organic produce delivery service that outgrew its original location in Pennsauken, N.J. and expanded to a new location in Delanco, about 10 miles up the Delaware River.  

The expansion required construction of a new cold storage warehouse with a processing and packing area large enough to double the company’s order capacity and allow opportunities to serve Southern and Midwestern markets.

For Misfits Market, freezer and refrigerator temperature standards were critical, so New Jersey-based general contractor Stanker & Galetto, along with metal panel subcontractor and installer  Rufus Brubaker Refrigeration, turned to Metl-Span for the insulated metal panels they needed for the warehouse project.

They selected Metl-Span’s CF Mesa panels, which are popular for exterior and interior uses. The panels are designed for cold storage applications, including cooler buildings, freezers, food processing buildings, dry goods warehouses, and buildings where temperature control and insulation values are key to functionality.

The panels are built for performance with a factory foamed-in-place polyurethane core, paired with impermeable steel exterior and interior faces, which ensure the highest insulating values throughout a building’s lifecycle. The product’s unique foam core allows its insulation performance to improve as the panel’s core temperature decreases.

Meanwhile, the panels have a lightly corrugated profile on both faces, which creates symmetry on the outside and inside of the building. The minor rib provides a flattened, easy-to-clean surface, and the panels are easy to install, which reduces construction costs.

The Misfits Market project was substantial, requiring about 200,000 square feet of 42-inch wall panels, ranging from four-inches to five-inches thick. Panel thickness is a key consideration when dealing with cold storage, said Metl-Span Sales Representative Mike Rauch. The thickness and performance of the panels are dictated by the temperature within the building.

“In this case,” he says, “there were freezers and coolers. In the freezer, the exterior and interior wall panels were five inches. The cooler, designed to stay at 37-degrees and the repacking areas, designed to stay at 45-degrees, had walls that were each four inches thick.”

The project team relied on a Sandstone color for the exterior building envelope, and they selected Metl-Span’s standard interior color, Igloo White for the inside, creating a clean presentation that is fitting for interior wall partitions in cold storage facilities.

“When you design a cold storage building, you want to stay within a certain color range,” said Doug Horton, project estimator with Rufus Brubaker. “Dark colors, of course, are really not a good idea. With the ‘beige’ directive, Sandstone would be one of the darkest colors we’d use on a cold storage building.”

Horton said the CF Mesa insulated metal panels were an obvious choice for the Misfits Market project because of the temperature requirements, but they were selected for other reasons as well.

Metl-Span has a reputation for great quality and service throughout the southern New Jersey region and beyond, he said.

“When it comes down to it, Metl-Span is all about customer service. We have a good, ongoing relationship with them. Their plants are well located, so we get our deliveries in a better time frame. They’re always good to work with, from their reps to their support staff.”

Metl-Span is also there on the front end of projects to head off any future challenges that could stand in the way.

For example, to ensure proper performance, Metl-Span conducted a connection analysis to ensure thermal bow would not create distortions in the building’s metal doors. That is a typical challenge in taller buildings, Metl-Span’s Rauch said,

“During the design and bidding phases, we performed a panel attachment analysis to make sure that thermal bow wouldn’t come into play by providing the proper structure behind the panel.”

Through it all, the project was successful, taking less than six months to complete, allowing Misfits Market to begin operations in their new facility in October 2020.

Soon after the building opened, the company emerged as the leading subscription-based organic produce delivery service for consumers, and it has become the nation’s fastest-growing grocery delivery service.

Misfits Market Chief Operating Officer Chris Nelson said the new facility has been the key to the company’s growth surge.

“The increased capacity and operations sophistication on-site allows us to further expand our product offerings, release new product features, and continue to rescue tens of millions of pounds of produce annually,” Nelson said.

That’s a win, not only for Misfits Market and its expanding team, but also for customers across the country.

Metl-Span is a NUCOR® company. (NYSE: NUE ); delivering high-quality, durable and energy-efficient insulated metal panels designed for unparalleled performance to stand the test of time.