Air France KLM Martinair Cargo has contracted Lödige Industries to automate the Perishables Centre it operates at Paris Charles de Gaulle, the airline group and the German handling-systems manufacturer have announced.

The agreement names two parties with distinct track records. Air France KLM Martinair Cargo runs the freight arm of a group whose combined passenger network spans Amsterdam and Paris. Lödige Industries, headquartered in Frankfurt, supplies cargo terminal systems — storage, conveying and handling equipment — to airlines, ground handlers and logistics operators worldwide.

What is being automated?

The project targets the Perishables Centre at Paris-CDG, the facility dedicated to temperature-sensitive freight: flowers, fruit, vegetables, seafood, meat and pharmaceutical-adjacent goods that require unbroken cool-chain handling between aircraft and customer.

Automation of such a facility typically carries two consequences. It raises throughput per square metre of refrigerated space, which is scarce and expensive at a hub the size of Charles de Gaulle. It also shortens dwell time for goods whose commercial value decays by the hour.

Neither party has yet published the contract value, a delivery date or the specific technologies involved. In an announcement of this kind, those gaps are customary; the absence of figures, however, means capacity gains cannot yet be quantified against the centre's existing throughput.

Why the operator and the supplier each want this

For Air France KLM Martinair Cargo, the perishables segment is a margin play within a cargo market that remains rate-sensitive. Fresh produce and flowers move in high volumes through both Paris and Amsterdam, and the group competes with road feeder services and rival hubs — notably Liège and Frankfurt — for this freight.

Automated handling reduces manual touchpoints, and each removed touchpoint in a cool chain is one fewer point at which temperature excursions occur. Fewer excursions mean fewer insurance claims and fewer rejections at the receiver's door.

For Lödige, an airline-group reference at a top-tier European hub strengthens its position in a market where cargo terminal modernisation budgets are recovering after the pandemic-era logistics boom reshaped freight flows.

What remains unconfirmed

The announcement establishes the deal and its location. It does not, on the information released so far, establish a commissioning timeline, an investment amount, or the volume of perishables the automated centre is designed to process per year.

These figures will determine whether the project is a routine equipment upgrade or a genuine capacity expansion for the group's Paris cargo operation. Until they appear, the claim of "automation" at the Perishables Centre rests on the contract's existence rather than on measurable output.

Commissioning details, and the first indication of whether throughput at the centre rises measurably, should become clear as Lödige begins engineering and installation work at Charles de Gaulle.