After a longstanding successful business of 47 years, Anthony (Tony) Madden has decided to call it a day and retire.
He founded Madden’s Refrigerated Transport in 1974, as a general freight company operating out of Goulburn. Early into the business, he landed an account with Tancred’s Meat Company and began delivering meat into Canberra and the surrounding regions.
In 1980 Tancred Meats purchased the Harden Abattoirs in the South West Slopes region of NSW. They approached Madden to move his business to Harden and after some consideration the decision was made to move. Harden not only had its own abattoir but provided a central location to both the abattoir at Cootamundra and the abattoir at Young. It also provided close proximity to the fertile fruit growing areas of Young, Kingsvale and Wombat and was ideally situated for transportation to both Sydney and Melbourne. Proud of the reputation of the growing business, it was decided to change the company name to Maddens Refrigerated Transport.
Coles approached Madden in 1985 as they wanted a specialised refrigerated transport provider to cart chilled meat direct from the local abattoirs to the supermarkets. This was the first contract for the direct delivery of chilled and frozen meat for Coles to be signed outside of the major cities. By this time, Maddens Refrigerated Transport was picking up chilled and frozen meat from Cootamundra, Gundagai, Harden, Junee, and Young abattoirs, with deliveries directly into supermarkets as far south as Eden and as far north as Port Macquarie.
With the business further expanding into the cartage of frozen produce, Madden identified the need for a commercial cold storage facility in the area. In 1998 a 400-pallet export cold storage and blast freezing facility was built at the Harden site. Chilled meat and fresh fruit from the local area would be blast frozen at Harden, preserving the quality of produce, reducing costs to customers of transporting product to Sydney for blast freezing. The name of the company was also changed to Maddens Refrigerated Transport and Cold Storage.
Demand for the services of the cold storage facility were growing, and in 2007 Madden purchased the now closed Harden abattoir site with the view of creating a larger export cold storage and blast freezing facility. The new 2000-pallet cold storage facility opened in 2008, packing between 500-650 export containers per year.
Maddens Refrigerated Transport and Cold Storage has continued to grow and evolve over time with the needs of its customers, providing temperature controlled transport, general freight transport, dry storage, blast freezing, frozen storage, chilled storage, container packing, local and interstate deliveries.
Now, as Madden prepares for retirement, he has decided to sell his remaining fleet – consisting of approximately 16 trucks and 23 trailers – via Grays.com. Assets will range from Kenworth and DAF prime movers to FTE refrigerated trailers and more.
“Grays has been great to deal with since day one and the main reason I am selling with them is due to being able to sell my fleet from the comfort of my yard,” explained Madden.
“Steve has also been very attentive and gone over and beyond. Not having to relocate my fleet to another site is a huge weight off my shoulders.”
The online auction will commence on February 9 and close February 15.
To find out more about this major retirement sale, visit grays.com/maddens or contact Steve Martin on 0447 144 579/steve.martin@grays.com.au for any further information regarding the sale.