Client
Costco
Project type
Location
Varennes, Québec
Area
650,000 ft2

One of the largest retail companies in the world, Costco operates a chain of membership-only warehouse clubs internationally. 

Four times the size of Montréal’s Bell Centre, Costco’s new 650,000 ft2 cross-dock warehouse in Varennes required precise planning and logistics. It was constructed on a 3.7 million ft2 site. The project consists of both dry and refrigerated space. DIVCO was also mandated to build Costco’s first e-commerce fulfillment center in Québec as part of the warehouse, which used a state-of-the-art proprietary racking system to maximise the capacity of this immense facility.

The warehouse started operating 3,5 months after the construction.

The $100 million project involved a great deal of work to prepare the site before the construction could even begin: an existing, defunct petrochemical plant first had to be demolished, the site needed to be decontaminated, a river had to be diverted and a new access bridge had to be built. Once that was done, there were only 10 months before the completion deadline. Despite the tight schedule, all the municipal, regional and provincial approvals required for construction were successfully obtained on time. Construction continued non-stop seven days a week, with a very significant labor force being deployed in order to achieve this aggressive timeline.