STEEL AWARDS
Bespoke KZN packhouse
John Carter
Typically, packing facilities are designed to handle a single commodity or at least similar items. This was not the case for the UCL packhouse, which recently received a regional award at the 2025 South African Institute for Steel Construction Awards.
The design team’ s brief was to package both avocados and kiwis in the same facility, which led to the development of specific protocols for product flow and refrigeration solutions to accommodate both commodities within the same site.
According to the citation from the Steel Awards 2025 judges, the UCL Fruit Packing Facility is a state-of-the-art logistics centre in Dalton, KZN, built as a greenfield, fit-forpurpose operation designed to process both avocado and kiwi fruit. The facility ' s highly efficient design and swift realisation on a challenging, sloping site exemplify structural ingenuity, earning the Best Regional Project in KwaZulu-Natal Award.
The project team chose a full-structural steel superstructure supported by concrete stubs to meet tight deadlines. The inherent long-span capacity of steel proved crucial, offering large, unobstructed floor areas necessary for high-performance packaging equipment with strict spatial constraints.
Continuous roof sheeting, extending over 75m in length, was chosen to suit the KZN climate. Simultaneously, the steel structure provided the best cost-to-area ratio for this demanding warehouse type.
42 summer 2025-26 | www. tobuild. co. za