Approved cold stores in England and Wales: how approval and the FSA register work
A cold store that holds meat, fish, dairy or egg products for other food businesses is more than a refrigerated warehouse. Under Article 4(2) of Regulation (EC) No 853/2004, as it applies in Great Britain, an establishment handling products of animal origin for which Annex III lays down requirements may not operate until the competent authority has approved it. The exceptions are narrow: establishments carrying out only primary production, transport operations, certain retail operations, or the storage of products not requiring temperature-controlled storage conditions. Chilled and frozen storage of these products is therefore an approved activity, and approved sites are added to the list of approved food establishments that the Food Standards Agency (FSA) publishes for England and Wales on data.food.gov.uk.
The register in numbers (snapshot as at 1 November 2026)
The FSA file held 5,318 approved establishments in England and Wales as at 1 November 2026. Of those, 1,897 were approved for cold store activity — 1,785 in England and 112 in Wales. Among those establishments, cold storage is the second most common approved activity after processing plants (2,677), because it is recorded both for dedicated cold storage sites and for meat, fish and dairy plants that hold product in their own chilled and frozen rooms.
| Cold store approvals by other activity on the same site | Sites |
|---|---|
| Cold store only (no other approved activity) | 878 |
| Re-wrapping and repackaging | 609 |
| Cutting plant | 606 |
| Processing plant | 388 |
| Slaughterhouse | 95 |
| Fresh fishery products plant | 51 |
| Game handling establishment | 27 |
A site can hold several approvals, so the rows overlap. Cold storage itself is recorded under Section 0, general activity establishments: every one of the 1,897 approvals carries the code CS there, and 877 of the 878 cold-store-only sites carry nothing else. The Annex III food sections come from the other activities on the same site. Among the 1,897 establishments, 545 also hold approvals under the minced meat, meat preparations and mechanically separated meat section, 512 under meat of domestic ungulates, 427 under poultry and lagomorph meat, 253 under meat products, 121 under wild game meat, 117 under fishery products and 81 under raw milk and dairy products.
Who approves a cold store: the FSA or the local authority
Responsibility is split. Local authorities approve standalone cold stores and re-wrapping and repackaging establishments, together with most minced meat, meat preparation, meat products, fish and shellfish, dairy and egg establishments. The FSA approves the establishments that need veterinary control — slaughterhouses, cutting plants, game handling establishments and wholesale meat markets — and a cold store on the same site as one of those is normally approved by the FSA as part of that establishment. In the November 2026 file, 1,269 cold store approvals name a local authority as the competent authority and 628 name the FSA; 611 of the FSA cold stores share their site with a cutting plant, slaughterhouse or game handling establishment.
The practical consequence for anyone selling into these sites: the inspector, the audit regime and the paperwork differ. A standalone cold store answers to its council's food team, while a cold room attached to a cutting plant sits inside the FSA's official controls for the meat plant.
Reading an approval number and the identification mark
The approval number is the identifier that matters in storage contracts, product specifications and customer audits. FSA approvals carry numeric approval numbers (5105, for example), while almost all local-authority approvals pair a letter code with a number (GR 025, MY 004). Under Annex II, Section I of Regulation 853/2004, the identification mark of an establishment in Great Britain must be oval, include “UK”, “GB” or the words “United Kingdom”, and indicate the approval number of the establishment. When a product’s packaging or wrapping is removed, or it is further processed in another establishment, a new mark must be applied showing the approval number of the establishment where that took place.
That rule separates two kinds of cold store. A store that only receives, holds and dispatches sealed cases leaves the producer’s mark untouched. A store that breaks cases down and re-packs product applies its own mark, and re-wrapping and repackaging is approved as a separate activity — 609 cold store approvals in the file carry it alongside cold storage.
Where approved cold storage concentrates
By the register’s town field, London has the most cold store approvals (180), followed by Birmingham (80), Bristol (34), Leeds (33), Bradford (30), Grimsby (29), Manchester (27) and Liverpool (23). In Wales, the Swansea (16) and Cardiff (14) local authority areas hold the most, followed by Carmarthenshire and Flintshire (9 each). Large logistics operators appear many times, each site with its own approval number — Constellation Cold Logistics, for example, holds nine cold store approvals, six of them in Grimsby — so counting approvals is not the same as counting companies.
What an approval does not tell you
- Capacity: approval says nothing about pallet positions, the number of chambers or blast-freezing capacity.
- Temperature regime: the register does not distinguish chilled from frozen storage.
- Commercial model: a cold store approval may belong to a third-party storage operator or to a processor holding only its own product; the trading name and the activities approved on the same site are the best clues.
- Legal entity: the register gives a trading name, which can differ from the company name registered at Companies House.
- Timing: the FSA publishes the file as a snapshot as at the first of each month, so approvals granted after that date appear only in a later file.
How buyers use an approved cold store shortlist
Meat, fish and dairy traders and importers use the approval number to confirm that a storage partner holds cold store approval before signing a storage agreement, and pick sites by town or postcode to keep haulage short. Refrigeration, insulated panel, racking and maintenance contractors work the other way round: the 878 sites approved for cold storage alone run storage without other approved activities on site, while the 606 sites co-located with cutting plants keep their cold rooms inside a meat production plant.