Congebec's Mascouche facility — a nine-million-cubic-foot industrial freezer on Montreal's North Shore — placed in the top three for the BRCGS Certificated Site of the Year Award for the Americas at the 2026 BRCGS Awards held in Nashville. The honor recognizes food safety culture, quality systems, operational discipline, and continuous improvement across BRCGS-certified cold-chain sites throughout the region.
The Facility at a Glance
Opened in 2023, Mascouche is Congebec's most recent ground-up construction and its largest single-site statement of modern cold-chain and storage philosophy. The building integrates a CO₂ refrigeration system, a high-efficiency thermal building envelope, underfloor hot-glycol heating, high-insulation doors, and air curtains — a package that reflects growing foodservice operator and retailer demand for both food-safe and energy-responsible third-party logistics infrastructure. Material-handling equipment runs on lithium smart batteries, and the site includes energy-regeneration systems and EV charging stations, positioning it squarely in the sustainability conversation that now shapes major cold-storage procurement decisions.
Three Straight AA Audits
Mascouche achieved a BRCGS AA rating in 2024, 2025, and 2026, recording zero non-conformities in both the 2024 and 2026 audits. That streak across three consecutive certification cycles is unusual in an industry where even a single minor non-conformity can trim a top score. Two other Congebec facilities — Boucherville and Godin — have also earned BRCGS AA ratings with zero non-conformities, suggesting a network-wide quality discipline rather than a single-site outlier performance. Congebec holds dual BRCGS and SQF certification at select sites, a combination increasingly demanded by major grocery and foodservice retail customers that require suppliers to demonstrate cross-standard compliance.
"Being recognized as top 3 among outstanding facilities across the Americas is an important achievement for our Mascouche team," said Carolina Téllez, Director, Quality Assurance at Congebec. "It reflects the care, rigour and accountability our employees bring to food safety every day."
What It Means for the Cold Chain
For equipment specifiers and consultants designing cold-chain and refrigeration infrastructure, the Mascouche build represents a benchmark worth tracking. The combination of CO₂ natural refrigerant systems, lithium-battery MHE, and envelope performance features — air curtains, high-insulation doors, hot-glycol underfloor heating — is increasingly the specification baseline for large-footprint frozen-storage projects in Canada and the northern U.S. Regulatory pressure to phase down HFC refrigerants, combined with tightening food-safety audit standards, is accelerating operator interest in exactly this kind of purpose-built, multi-certification facility.
Customer testimonials submitted in support of the BRCGS nomination highlighted traceability, positive audit experiences, accurate follow-up, and responsiveness — attributes that matter equally to food-manufacturing operators selecting a third-party cold-chain partner and to foodservice distributors managing temperature-sensitive SKUs across long supply lanes.
"This recognition confirms that Mascouche is operating among the best facilities in our industry," said Nicholas-P. Pedneault, CEO of Congebec. Congebec has operated for more than 50 years and maintains a multi-province Canadian network spanning Québec, Ontario, Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta, and British Columbia.
Written by Michael Politz, Author of Guide to Restaurant Success: The Proven Process for Starting Any Restaurant Business From Scratch to Success (ISBN: 978-1-119-66896-1), Founder of Food & Beverage Magazine, the leading online magazine and resource in the industry. Designer of the Bluetooth logo and recognized in Entrepreneur Magazine's "Top 40 Under 40" for founding American Wholesale Floral, Politz is also the Co-founder of the Proof Awards and the CPG Awards and a partner in numerous consumer brands across the food and beverage sector.
