Quorn Foods has recently installed a new walk-in dual freezer facility at its site in Norfolk, with the help of Cold Store Rentals, to help save on costs and create 30 percent greater capacity to store its meat free alternative to bacon.
Quorn Foods has recently installed a new walk-in dual freezer facility at its site in Norfolk, with the help of Cold Store Rentals, to help save on costs and create 30 percent greater capacity to store its meat free alternative to bacon.
Quorn Foods needed to upgrade its existing cold storage in order to provide more room to store the meat free bacon, at variable temperatures. One side of the new freezer box is set at -18°C to store the product in its frozen form; the other side is set at -5°C, to get the meat free bacon to the specific temperature at which it can be sliced, ready for packaging.
Ian Smith, site services manager at Quorn, said, “The previous freezer could only hold enough product for an eight hour slicing-run, however with our working day being 12 hours, we needed 30% more capacity to store enough for a full day’s run. We’d been renting the old box for about eight years, and made the decision to fully purchase this one, which has resulted in a huge saving with only a two and a half year payback on it. This is a real positive as we now own those assets.”
The old freezer boxes were on trailers in the loading bays, so when the team at Cold Store Rentals were invited to tender, they came up with a solution that still used the same space, and still retained the same height level, but are custom built modular rooms rather than being temporary portable type units.
The height is retained by having the custom built freezers on a solid metal framework, which allows the product to be easily accessed and used a docking station in the bays.
Mr Smith continued: “The installation process was really efficient and quick due to the modular build. It took two weeks including the framework, so the actual box only took about a week. The business was only down for two weeks which was really good for us, if it wasn’t a modular unit, it could have otherwise taken five or six weeks, having bigger implications for the business.
“Having it built this way with Cold Store Rentals, it also allows us the option to expand it out in the future, if we get to a point where we need a greater capacity. And if we need to move it somewhere else, we can always just take it down and re-erect elsewhere. We were really impressed with the quality, attitude and professionalism of the installers and management at Cold Store Rentals. They were really friendly and kept us in the informed at all times. There were no problems and everything was spot on.”