Two Tips for Restauranteurs Who Are Taking on Freezer Room Construction Projects

Here are some tips to follow if you're a restauranteur and are taking on a freezer room construction project.

Measure your biggest freezer food items before having the shelves built

You should measure your largest freezer food items before having the shelves built. For example, if you serve turkeys around Christmastime and purchase extra-large frozen ones in bulk just before December, you should check the approximate dimensions of this large item before telling the contractor how wide the freezer's shelves need to be. Similarly, if you often prep and freeze vegetables and store them in huge plastic containers in the freezer, you should ensure that the shelves are wide enough to hold the largest of these containers.

This will mean that there will be no chance of, for example, the frozen turkeys hanging off the shelves and potentially dropping onto the floor of the freezer room when a kitchen staff member shakes the shelves whilst removing something from them. This is important, not only because this could lead to the food getting dirty but also because a large, heavy item that's frozen solid could damage the floor or injure a staff member if it slides off a shelf.

Ask for a sliding shelf ladder to be built

It's sensible to ask for the freezer room's shelves to be ceiling height in order to fully utilise the room's storage capacity. However, if you do this, you should also have the builder create a sliding shelf ladder for the shelving unit so your staff can easily access the foods on these higher shelves.

Whilst you could just keep a stepladder in the freezer, this sliding shelf ladder would be much safer and more practical. The reason for this is that the floor of a freezer room can get icy and slippery. As such, if a staff member stands on a stepladder on this icy surface, it could slide whilst they're on it and cause them to fall over.

In contrast, if the ladder is attached to the shelves, its stability will be unaffected by any ice on the floor and the staff can safely use it to reach the items on the higher shelves. If you ask the builder to do this, you may also need them to add extra walls brackets to the shelving units so that there will be no possibility of a staff member's weight causing the unit to detach from the wall when they're on the attached shelf ladder.


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