Refrigerant regulations may come with a long runway, but the storage transition is already beginning. Addie Waxman of McCain Foods and Victoria Stamper of United Potato Growers of Canada explain why the seed industry cannot afford to treat this as a distant issue.
The American Innovation and Manufacturing (AIM) Act is quietly reshaping how refrigerants are produced, sold and phased out in the United States. While its deadlines stretch into the next decade, its impact on cold storage is already unfolding, which matters to seed growers more than many realize.
Seed depends on cold storage at nearly every stage of its lifecycle. Temperature-controlled storage helps preserve germination and vigor, stabilizes dormancy, protects treated seed and allows inventory to move between harvest, conditioning, sales and delivery windows without quality loss. It is what makes carryover possible and what absorbs the shock of weather, market shifts and logistical delays. When cold storage systems are disrupted, the consequences show up quickly in inventory risk, costs and field performance.
As the AIM Act accelerates the transition away from high-global-warming-potential refrigerants, those storage systems are entering a period of change. The regulatory dates may sound distant, but cold storage does not move on policy timelines. It moves on equipment lifespans, refrigerant availability, service capacity and unplanned failures that force decisions long before a deadline arrives.
Within the seed industry, refrigerant regulation is often framed as a 2035 problem: something to deal with later. That assumption overlooks how refrigeration transitions actually happen. Facilities are designed and retrofitted years in advance. Refrigerants become harder to source. Technicians retrain. By the time regulations fully take effect, many options are already off the table.
That is why a seed publication would turn to Addie Waxman of McCain Foods and Victoria Stamper of United Potato Growers of Canada. Waxman brings the processor’s view of how regulatory change translates into real cold-storage infrastructure decisions at scale. Stamper brings a grower-focused and industry-wide perspective, where the costs, access issues and operational risks of those decisions are felt earliest and longest.
In this conversation, they separate myth from reality around what is coming and what is already changing. They explain why the market is beginning to shift well ahead of the final regulatory dates, what assumptions the industry may be making that could prove costly and why early awareness gives companies the one thing they cannot buy later: time.
The AIM Act may feel distant on paper. In practice, it is already shaping the cold storage systems seed relies on.
If your work touches storage, conditioning or seed movement at any scale, this is a conversation worth watching before the transition stops feeling theoretical.
Watch the full video to hear what Waxman and Stamper say the seed industry should be thinking about now
