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Oct 21, 2020 (newstodate): Avinor gets credit from the industry for taking a fresh and open approach to the future seafood terminal infrastructure at Oslo Airport.
   On October 13, 2020, Avinor published a Request for Information to stakeholders in the seafood related industries with October 30, 2020, as deadline for signing up for participation in the process.
   Avinor has dedicated an area of 20,280 sq m to construction of a seafood terminal, and with the ROI Avinor hopes to gain information from stakeholders on success criteria to be integrated in future development plans as well as factors to be included in tenders for operation and land lease contracts.
   -We absolutely welcome this new approach by Avinor to seek information and opinions from the stakeholders in the industry before making any decisions, says Torgil Staalberg, GPC Managing Director.
   -We are working on our response to the ROI and we hope to a partner in the developments to come. Much time has been lost over the years of uncertainty which made it impossible for us as well as for other seafood handling providers to plan for the future while battling with constraints at existing facilities.
   -We definitely want to build our own new seafood terminal, probably in cooperation with an investor, and with a period of some 1.5-2 years from start of a project till commissioning of a new facility there is no more time to lose if we are to meet the challenge of a renewed surge in volumes after the current slowdown, says Mr Staalberg.
   Already in 2016, Avinor boldly announced plans for construction of a large automated terminal capable of handling up to 250,000 tonnes of seafood shipments.
   As a result of its top-down approach, the project received a cold shoulder from the supposed stakeholders and was finally shelved in 2019, as the designated partner to operate the terminal, WFS, also abrogated the contract.
   Since then, the industry has been left in a vacuum as to the future layout of the seafood handling infrastructure at Oslo Airport, while even in normal times volumes have exceeded the capacity at several of the existing seafood handling providers Roadfeeders, Spirit Air Cargo Handling, Gardermoen Perishables Center, Menzies and DHL.