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Compared to other commercial spaces that are similar in size, quick service restaurants (QSRs) on average consume more energy per square foot than different types of commercial businesses. One main reason is the need to store foods and ingredients in walk-in coolers and freezers, a need that requires a significant amount of electricity. When refrigeration fails, it can be costly in different ways. Freezer burn, for example, can lead to food waste, leading to lost revenue.

Food quality is highly dependent on proper storage climates. Temperature and moisture levels must remain within an ideal range for food to stay fresh, delicious, and safe to eat. Overly-warm and moist conditions encourage the growth of microorganisms in food. And when an item becomes contaminated, it can also quickly spread to the food stored around it. On the other side of the coin, some foods can be destroyed by being kept in conditions that are too cold. The proper temperature and moisture levels are crucial to food storage.

Knowing how refrigeration works is crucial to finding the right solutions for your foodservice operation, and fortunately, the basics are easy to understand and quite interesting to learn. 

Hydrofluorocarbon (HFC) refrigerants, once thought beneficial for the environment, are now better understood to have a detrimental impact on the ozone. CARB’s California Senate Bill 1383 set the goal to reduce emissions from HFC refrigerants to 40 percent below 2013 levels by the year 2030. 

As with other industries, the foodservice sector is facing many unique challenges. In 2022, restaurants and other cold storage establishments must deal with many issues, making it harder to maintain one's bottom line, especially as utility bills continue to increase. Thankfully, technology can help foodservice operations mitigate these problems and make their locations more efficient.

When aiming to launch a successful restaurant, the owner should be looking at a few key aspects: business strategy, food design, staff hiring, and restaurant equipment. Technology has become especially relevant in all aspects of today's foodservice industry, with restaurant owners upgrading their workplaces with the latest digital menus and self-ordering kiosks. But we've found three innovations restaurants should incorporate to help their business succeed.

Refrigeration has been one of the better innovations of our era, bringing about a great deal of convenience for businesses and everyday households. Before this technology was introduced, people were left with limited methods of preserving their food and cooling down their homes during the hot months of summer. The success of modern refrigeration is largely due to refrigerants, the chemicals used to cool the air.

Having a great walk-in cooler or freezer is important in every restaurant and bar. But walk-ins aren't only for the foodservice industry. In fact, having customized walk-in coolers and freezer for a variety of businesses is a trend that has been going upward. Here are some places where having walk-ins helps improve business and sales. 

The world around us continues to launch new technologies that transform and enhance our day-to-day lives, and developments in refrigeration technologies are no different. Innovations have resulted in the implementation of advanced compressors and controls that improve performance, allow for real-time monitoring, improve energy efficiency, and safeguard important product with system redundancy. These improvements have an impact on the system architecture, and the correlated written specifications.

If you're a foodservice consultant and you haven’t looked at your refrigeration specifications lately, maybe you should. Consider these questions as you review your specs and ask yourself:

Does my specification reference up-to-date compressor applications, evaporator controls and clear directives for piping and wiring practices?

Does the equipment in my specification utilize energy-efficient solutions for the compressor and evaporator systems?

Does the equipment in my specifications comply with all regulatory guidelines?

There are numerous types of refrigeration systems available in the industry today. Individual pre-assembled remote systems, large and small rack systems, digital systems, water-cooled, and air-cooled systems to name a few. These systems can be built with semi-hermetic compressors, hermetic compressors, scroll compressors, or digital scroll compressors. The enclosures can be made of stainless steel, galvanized steel, or powder-coated steel. Do you know which system best fits your application?

Are the evaporator coils specified to be pre-wired and pre-plumbed at the factory? Do they include the latest energy-efficient controllers and EEVs? And what about redundancy and monitoring?