Warehousing Melbourne

45,000 pallet positions, thirteen kilometres from the Port of Melbourne. A rate can be negotiated and a service problem can be fixed. Neither of those two numbers can be moved.

IFC’s Melbourne operation is in Altona, in the western industrial belt. Our most recent expansion added 27,000 square metres, and the site is also our head office, so the people who run your account can walk out and look at your stock.

Why Altona

Melbourne’s container trade runs through one gate. The Port of Melbourne handles around 36 per cent of Australia’s containers, and 87 per cent of the import boxes that land there travel less than 50 kilometres to their destination. Where your warehouse sits inside that 50 kilometres decides what you pay per container and how many times you pay it.

Altona is about 13 kilometres from the port. That is close enough to run same-day container moves and short enough that a truck can do more than one turn in a shift.

Two pieces of infrastructure changed this in the last few years. The West Gate Tunnel opened in 2025 and gives high-productivity freight vehicles direct access to Swanson Dock, cutting up to twenty minutes in peak. And Altona now has its own rail connection to the port through Victoria’s Port Rail Shuttle Network, which is the state’s answer to taking container trucks off the inner west’s roads.

None of that is IFC’s doing. It is the reason the suburb is where it is, and it is why your container costs less to move from here than from the eastern suburbs.

The racking decides what the building can do

Altona runs over 36,000 stored locations of Silverline P90+ pallet racking, in a mix of double deep and selective.

That mix is the reason the site holds 45,000 pallets without turning every pick into a shuffle. Double deep puts two pallets in the depth of one bay, which suits slow-moving lines you hold in volume. Selective keeps every pallet on a single reach, which is what fast-movers need when the dispatch cut-off is in twenty minutes. A warehouse racked entirely one way forces you to choose. This one does not.

The racking was manufactured in Australia. On a build this size that decision avoided 139 tonnes of carbon emissions, roughly the equivalent of 7,860 trees. If your own customers are asking you about scope 3, that is a figure you can use.

The head office is on the floor

Altona is IFC’s head office as well as our Victorian distribution centre. When something goes wrong in a warehouse run remotely, you escalate to a phone number. When it goes wrong here, the person who can fix it is a hundred metres from the pallet.

What Altona handles

Altona operates the full IFC warehousing capability: accredited operations, reefer container storage, AQIS inspections on site, cross-docking, and the value added services that run across the network. See here for the detail.

Next steps

• If you want the logistics function run rather than the space, check out our 3PL Melbourne services
• If you need warehousing in more than one state, check out our nation wide warehousing services.