Managing a grocery store can be a rewarding experience. You get to talk to your customers everyday and you go home satisfied every night knowing your store provided folks with the food they need for a week of healthy home-cooked meals. On the flip side, there are duties you must perform regularly to ensure food safety—like cleaning freezer units, checking the temperature of food coolers and inspecting chillers for damage. A key example is your store’s meat freezers, which need to be regularly cleaned and maintained to avoid food spoilage and health hazards.

If you have a frozen meat section, here are five signs to watch for that it may be time to replace your grocery store’s commercial freezers in Eugene, OR:

• Not cold all the time: You may start to notice that one of your meat freezers is having a hard time maintaining a set cold temperature. While you are less likely to be able to feel a temperature difference, what you will notice are indications of the freezer randomly thawing and then refreezing. Meat products will be covered in frosty ice, as will freezer shelves and baskets. Unfortunately, big temperature fluctuations could mean the unit is about to go kaput.
• Meats are not solid: Fresh meats go on shelves in a chiller, while frozen cuts of meat are placed in temperature-controlled freezers to keep them frozen solid. If your employees come across meats in a freezer that are soft or semi-soft, first check to make sure the temperature setting is correct. If it reads as it should, you need to consider a malfunction and get the meat into another freezer as soon as possible—assuming it’s still good. Conduct regular walkthrough inspections for issues before a customer points them out.
• Physical damage to units: While commercial meat freezers are strong, they can sustain damage just like your freezer at home. Meat freezers take beatings everyday. From rough stocking to customers haphazardly dropping items back into freezer bays, once visible cracks form, you might want to make repairs or invest in replacements.
• Doesn’t hold all your meat products: Maybe your grocery store inventory has grown or the demand for frozen meats has increased. Either reason should get you thinking about upgrading to larger, more efficient commercial freezers in Eugene, OR for your business. Alternatively, you might want to downsize your meat freezer if you’ve decided to stock fewer frozen meat options.
• Needs constant maintenance: Although routine maintenance is important for proper freezer function, the unit starts to become a problem when it needs too much professional maintenance or repair. Old freezers are more likely to act up, and defective parts on newer units can cause a total failure. It could be worth it to replace the freezer instead of paying for repairs every month.

If your grocery store’s commercial freezers in Eugene, OR are in need of repairs or you require completely new unit installations, call the professionals at American Refrigeration Inc. Our friendly and helpful commercial refrigeration and freezer technicians are at the ready to get your business back to normal operation in no time!