UPS has invested $48 million in 27 temperature-controlled cross-dock facilities in several U.S. and international markets, part of its ongoing efforts to capture more business from healthcare shippers, the carrier announced last week.
The investment included a combination of building cross-dock facilities from scratch and upgrading existing locations, Kiel Harkness, UPS' VP of strategy for healthcare, said in an interview with Supply Chain Dive. The company's temperature-controlled cross-dock locations include Chicago, Los Angeles, Boston, Miami and Toronto, he added.
Most of the locations are within an airport or close to one, allowing quick access to short-term temperature-controlled storage between air and ground transportation movements, per the release. This helps UPS keep products like biologics and GLP-1 injectables within their necessary temperature ranges.
"We want a seamless and as quick as possible transition from aircraft to the next mode, and that's a lot of what we've invested in creating for the pharma industry," Harkness said.
Once a shipment is stored in a cross-dock location, UPS can consolidate it with other freight from the customer or break it up into separate shipments.
"It could be we have a client who manufactures in one continent and then stores in our facilities in the destination continent, so we can break it and distribute from there," Harkness said. "So there's a number of kind of value-added activities that can happen in a cold chain cross-dock."
The investment marks another way UPS has pushed to strengthen its global healthcare logistics capabilities, which has become a larger priority as it looks for more profitable volumes beyond Amazon and other e-commerce businesses. The company's healthcare portfolio generated more than $11 billion in revenue last year, per its annual report, up from about $10.5 billion in 2024.
“We won’t forget healthcare ever, because healthcare is such an important part of our growth engine,” CEO Carol Tomé said in an April earnings call. “It is in every segment of our business with double-digit operating margins, and we’re going to continue to lean into that space in a meaningful way.”
Rival FedEx is also chasing more healthcare business with the recent launch of a dedicated organization called FedEx Life Sciences. The company exited its 2026 fiscal year with nearly $10 billion in healthcare transportation revenue.
Editor's note: This story was first published in our Logistics Weekly newsletter. Sign up here.
