Long before the government came up with its much-maligned 'smart economy' strategy for Irish industry, Paul Shortt, the managing director of logistics company Castlecool, had already realised that the days of just holding stock in cold storage for his customers was over. With a dozen household names in the food industry among the company's clients, Shortt realised that if Castlecool was to survive and grow it would have to offer additional services.

When food arrives at one of the giant Castlecool temperature-control facilities (to give an idea of the size of one of the sites, it handled 750,000 turkeys last Christmas) it isn't just left there waiting to be shipped on to its final destination. According to Shortt, its customers want the products sampled and tested for quality. Increasingly, the company is a vital part of the supply chain, he says.

"A lot of our competitors didn't identify those changes and stayed on in traditional warehousing, sorting pallets or boxes. They weren't putting any value-added services in. We will quality test all packaging and raw materials. We are an integral part of food production. That is what major international food companies are demanding. We need to progress every year. We know our customers are going to be demanding that," he says.

Castlecool was founded by Shortt, a former accountant at PricewaterhouseCoopers, and executive at what is now Lakeland Dairies, in 1993. For nearly two decades before that, he worked with the Dublin and London-quoted Norish, which owns cold-storage facilities in Ireland and the UK, as chief financial officer. But life running a public limited company wasn't for Shortt.

"I found a Plc is very slow to move. If an executive sees an opportunity... by the time you get to do something it's six or nine months down the line before anything happens... Sometimes a Plc can overdo due diligence."

So in 1993 he decided to set up on his own and spent nearly €2.5m building a cold-storage facility in Castleblaney, Co Monaghan. The location was ideal, he says, with huge food and meat processors already based in and around Monaghan, Louth and Cavan. The timing also helped, as many of his customers were outsourcing parts of their supply chain.

With business ticking along nicely, in the late 1990s he decided it was time to expand, doubling the size of the company, adding a new site in Dundalk and also buying out the venture-capital company that had originally financed him. Money was also poured into technology. The company invested millions in IT and mechanising its warehouses so that products can be tracked and distributed much more quickly. In 2006, just as the economy reached its peak, Shortt decided it was time to take a chance and expand again.

"We started looking at broadening the range [of services]. We were going to put in more capacity but we said if we want to increase capacity why not take a competitor out. Our main competitor was a Norish facility. It had been sold to another company, a transport company. We looked at that and it is a unit built in a food park on 64 acres of land," he says. On the site were a handful of food processors, who all shared central facilities like chillers, freezers, effluent and water treatment plants. The attraction for his tenants is that "by moving in here you only pay for what you use, you will save 30% on capital outlay. We now have eight companies in there."

Cross-border trade has helped win the company contracts from major supermarkets that operate in the North and South – Castleblaney is 92km from Dublin and 95km from Belfast.

Constantly adding new services has kept Castlecool profitable (turnover rose to about €10m last year), but Shortt is always on the lookout for further opportunities.

He adds: "For instance, we had a customer that wanted to freeze a product but they weren't sure what the freezing would cause to the product. So they asked us to do it. Within 24 hours we had an answer from a university in the United States on what the impact would be."

But it's not just the food sector that Castlecool is targeting, Shortt tells me.

"There are other industries that require temperature-control facilities. We've identified the pharmaceutical industry and we are going to aggressively target it. Those companies like to know what their costs are going to be. If you go in and agree a deal with them... they know for 12 months or two years that the costs are fixed. It takes substantial capital costs to do what we do. Parts of the IT industry require temperature-control facilities as well."

Another prospect is restaurants looking to have some of their food made in advance and delivered quickly.

"Everyone is looking at how they can get their product to the table much quicker. There are restaurants that are experimenting in preparing certain meals at the companies based in the food park. They want to cut down the size of the kitchen. We are working with them to see if there is somewhere they can prepare some meals in advance and get it to the table within hours but will still have the same quality. They [restaurants] may end up just doing the main course in the kitchen. By mass-producing starters and desserts you can cut down on costs and improve efficiency."

Shortt isn't stopping there. Another project is also on the go, which he says he can't discuss just yet.

It's companies like Castlecool that we're repeatedly told are the future for the economy, so does Shortt feel enterprises like Castlecool, which employs about 60 people, get the support they need from the government?

"The infrastructure, particularly the road network, has helped us. But we don't have a big inward-investment pool in Monaghan. People have continued to grow small enterprises. There are a lot of family-owned companies around here and we haven't suffered from having something like a Dell in our backyard."

Having kept the business profitable in the recession, Shortt won't be letting up and taking it easy.

"We had the opportunity to look at a few things in the UK. While we are and have been aggressively expanding, I want to keep our base solid. I've seen too many companies think further fields are greener and ignore their backyard."

Curriculum Vitae

Paul Shortt

Age: 58

Position: Managing director and owner of Castlecool. Also a director of Monaghan County Enterprise Fund and Castleblayney Enterprise Centre.

Family: Married, two adult sons.