Therm Expands Beyond Continental North America with First Island-Based Carbon Credit Project in Puerto Rico

LAKE FOREST, IL [Feb. 26, 2026]: Therm Solutions, Inc., a leader in eliminating super pollutants from the food supply chain, has issued its first carbon credits from an island-based project, expanding beyond its existing U.S. and Canadian footprint into Puerto Rico with a grocery retail refrigeration project. The project extends Therm's work into island food systems, where grid constraints, disaster risk, and limited infrastructure make reliable, climate-safe cold storage both harder to achieve and more critical.

The 5,476 credits were issued by ACR under its Advanced Refrigeration Systems (ARS) methodology. The methodology targets hydrofluorocarbon (HFC) refrigerants in commercial refrigeration systems, among the most potent greenhouse gases, which are released through leaks over the lifetime of the equipment. That leak pattern can persist for 15 to 20 years in newly built systems elsewhere in the industry. This project's cooling systems do not use HFCs. Built new with transcritical CO₂ from the outset, the store eliminates decades of superpollutant emissions while adding cold storage capacity in a food-constrained market.

The retailer has served communities across eastern Puerto Rico since 1993. The island's grid vulnerability, high energy costs, and reliance on imported food make cold chain reliability a food security issue, and carbon finance a practical tool for closing the infrastructure gap.

"Expanding into Puerto Rico required us to rethink assumptions we'd built around mainland markets, and our model held up," said Fritz Troller, CEO of Therm. "That gives us confidence that refrigerant substitution and cold-chain decarbonization can be deployed effectively across a much wider range of markets than the industry has historically targeted—island grids, disaster-prone regions, and food systems that mainstream carbon finance hasn't reached."

This project is part of Therm's broader push into global superpollutant methodologies, extending a model built in mainland U.S. grocery retail into new geographies, including Article 5 countries where cold chain infrastructure and carbon finance have historically been slower to connect.

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