David Mitchell – Garden State Cold Storage

David Mitchell has spent his career leaning into the unfamiliar. From launching a publicly traded infrastructure fund in the mid-2000s to overseeing the finances of a wind energy startup in Brazil, where he also founded a solar company, the veteran CFO has built his professional identity around calculated risk — the kind that demands both conviction and preparation. Today, that same instinct has brought him to Garden State Cold Storage, a New Jersey-based logistics company with an ambitious vision to reshape the cold storage industry in urban areas.

David Mitchell | Garden State Cold Storage | CFO

Mitchell arrived at Garden State Cold Storage roughly two years ago, recruited out of what he describes as a brief retirement. After departing an occupational health startup, he had helped grow from two clinics to nearly 25 in just two years, he stepped back from full-time work — only to find himself restless within months.

“I felt like my career wasn’t complete,” he says.

A career built on momentum

The restlessness that pulled Mitchell back into the workforce is not new. His professional arc is defined less by traditional advancement and more by a willingness to step into situations that others might view as uncertain. In 2004, he joined a group backed by a major Australian bank to launch the first publicly traded U.S. infrastructure fund—an effort that helped establish infrastructure as a mainstream asset class. The fund raised several hundred million dollars and acquired a portfolio of infrastructure businesses that eventually generated billions in market cap. Mitchell was among the first shareholders and had moved on well before the fund’s wind-down.

From there, he ran his wind farm in Brazil, served as the CFO for Advantage Rent-a-Car as part of Hertz’s acquisition of Dollar/Thrifty in 2012, and then got into renewables as the CFO of a solar startup in Brazil and, later, in the same role for a U.S. solar developer.

In 2022, he took on a CFO role at Agile Occupational Medicine, a California-based startup aiming to modernize the delivery of workplace health care. Private equity backing was secured, and Mitchell was brought in specifically to build the financial foundation: accounting systems, mergers and acquisitions and integration. He helped create a platform for its national footprint ambitions — but the California commute from New Jersey eventually became unsustainable, and the private equity firm wanted someone based on the ground.

He also spent a couple of years in Brazil as CFO of a wind energy company backed by major institutional investors. The wind farms were operational, carrying long-term contracts with a large Brazilian power company, and Mitchell understood the assignment from day one.

“I knew there was an endgame to that job,” he says. “I was brought in to recap the company and then sell it.”

That clarity about the shape of a role — and the discipline to execute within it — is part of what Mitchell brings to every engagement. He thrives in situations where the goal is ambitious, but the path requires building from scratch.

Entering cold storage

The introduction to Garden State Cold Storage came through a managing partner at a regional New Jersey accounting firm, someone Mitchell had known for more than two decades. The contact mentioned a family business doing creative things in cold storage and suggested Mitchell take a meeting. He accepted.

What he found when he sat down with founder Rocco Ruggiero was unexpected. Ruggiero, an immigrant from Italy who had worked his way up from the Fulton Fish Market, had spent decades building what Mitchell calls a mini empire of cold storage, real estate and food distribution businesses across the Northeast. The company operates two strategically located facilities in New Jersey and has spent more than 50 years earning a reputation for reliable, relationship-driven service — the kind of operation that takes on the harder accounts and finds ways to make them work.

Mitchell heard the vision, met the family, and decided it was worth another calculated risk.

“Never turn down a conversation,” he says.

He joined as CFO about two years ago and dove in immediately, executing a disciplined 30-60-90-day plan: pulling financial statements, mapping cash flows, meeting key personnel, and getting a handle on how the business actually made money. Cold storage, he noted, had not traditionally been tracked regularly. He introduced a reporting package and began building a data repository to inform future decisions.

Building toward something larger

Garden State Cold Storage — a leader in food and packaging logistics for over 20 years, specializing in cold storage and transportation within the Northeast — has recently received approval to build a large, state-of-the-art facility in Newark that would stand as the tallest building in the local industrial area. Located less than a mile from the Port of Newark, the project is expected to create significant employment in a historically underserved area and position the company to compete at a scale it has not yet achieved.

Mitchell is deeply involved in securing financing and shaping the strategy that will take the company there. But he’s also focused on the fundamentals of the existing operations. One facility spans 300,000 square feet, and efficiency inside it matters enormously. In one initiative spearheaded by one of Ruggiero’s sons, Eric, the company instituted zoning that removed manual decision-making from forklift operators and handed it to a computer system, routing orders by location within the freezer rather than by the order they were received. The result was a 30 percent increase in efficiency, faster order completion, reduced equipment wear, and less risk of work carrying over between shifts.

“Stay ahead of the work” is Rocco’s guiding principle, one that Mitchell has always embraced fully.

On the capital side, Mitchell frames his priorities in terms that reflect his broader philosophy. He talks about blocking and tackling — identifying the right KPIs, optimizing throughput and ensuring that every point of client contact is handled with care. Anyone can store a pallet, he says, but the real value is in what happens after that.

The work that remains

Mitchell is candid about what drew him back into the workforce and what continues to motivate him. He was not recruited into Garden State Cold Storage by a headhunter or a job listing — he was pulled in by a relationship, a conversation, and the sense that something interesting was being built.

He talks about wanting to leave his mark in the right way. He is thinking about technology, about automation, about how the new Newark facility should be designed from the ground up to accommodate the customers of the future. He is thinking about how to help Ruggiero transition a family-run business into a more structured, scalable enterprise while preserving the culture and client relationships that made it successful in the first place.

The cold storage industry may seem a long way from publicly traded infrastructure funds and renewable energy in Brazil. But Mitchell sees the through line clearly: every business, regardless of industry, ultimately comes down to generating a return commensurate with the risk. His job is to understand the nuances, protect the vision, and make sure it doesn’t get cloudy.

“My role as CFO is to protect the vision,” he says, “and ensure it doesn’t get cloudy.”

That is the work that remains — and for a CFO who once found retirement unsatisfying, it appears to be exactly enough.