The Cold Storage Company Ltd

Cold Storage moved to what is now Centrepoint, Orchard Road in 1917. The image above was taken during Hari Raya Puasa, 1985. Source: National Archives of Singapore, Media Image No: 19980006564 - 0081

Singapore’s Cold Storage Company Ltd was established in 1903, with the first supermarket opening in 1905 on Orchard Road. It imported frozen meat and dairy from Australia and acted as a storage and distribution service for fresh goods across Malaya, especially after the extension of the rail network across the peninsula¹.

By 1914, the service had been extended out to Penang, Ipoh, Kuala Lumpur, Taiping and Klang² and by the 1930s, refrigerated train services had enabled a variety of fresh goods to be transported all across the peninsula from Europe, as well as Australia.

The advent of the supermarket chain transformed the diets of many wealthy inhabitants, who were perhaps disinclined to eat more of the locally produced foods in favour of fancy imported goods or, simply, brands that they felt more familiar with. As a visitor to the Sea View Hotel remarked in the 1930s, inadvertently expressing a clear class divide:

"Here was a revolution… cold storage, electricity, the automobile, and air conditioning for Singapore’s plutocracy – all inventions that removed life’s main discomforts in the tropics."

— Margaret Shennan³

During the 1920s, the Cold Storage Company diversified into producing milk and dairy products, including ice-cream. This line was rebranded in 1937 as ‘Magnolia’ which remains familiar in modern-day Singapore. Magnolia’s base was the area known today as Dairy Farm, within the Bukit Timah Nature Reserve. Run by British expat Fred Heron, one of its goals was to provide children in Singapore with pasteurised milk, emulating the social welfare drive then at its apex in Britain, the ‘Milk in Schools Scheme’⁴.

One of the reasons that Dairy Farm’s imported Friesian cows⁵did so well outside of their native temperate environment was the addition of air conditioning in their stables, helping keep their temperatures at the optimum level for sustained health and fertility⁶.