How Cold Storage Doors Help Protect Your Food Production Facility

Operating and managing a food production facility is a challenging endeavor. Unlike warehouses that store products that can tolerate a wide range of temperature variance, food production facilities are tasked with keeping all rooms between a particular temperature range.

To ensure that the temperatures throughout all areas of your facility remain stable, keeping all food production facility doors secure and properly maintained is a must. However, even with the best protocols and rules following, issues with high energy use, maintenance, operational efficiency, and temperature regulation remain a constant struggle.

Explore some of the specific temperature-related challenges faced at food production facilities and how you can help your organization make improvements (such as adding high-speed freezer doors and insulated cold room doors) that save time and money.

Cold Storage Doors: Food Safety and Regulations

Above and beyond all other challenges food production facilities face, maintaining food safety is the most critical. Failure to properly manage the temperature in each storage room can result in various issues that impact food safety and integrity.

To ensure that your products are safe to consume, there are regulations governing almost every facet of the operation of a food production facility. When looking at structural elements, the Code of Federal Regulations Title 21 lays out specific rules for sanitation related to warehouse cold room doors and facilities.

More specifically, this regulation states, "All food manufacturing, including packaging and storage, shall be conducted under such conditions and controls as are necessary to minimize the potential for the growth of microorganisms, or the contamination of food." One of the best ways to comply with this requirement is to ensure that mechanical breakdowns, time delays, temperature fluctuations, and other factors do not contribute to the decomposition or contamination of food. This is achieved through using adequately functioning cold storage doors.

Several warning signs indicate that your industrial sliding freezer door or food production facility doors are not operating as they should be. For example, if you see frost on the edges of your cold storage doors, water or ice on the floor from condensation, or buildup on your freezer walls, ceiling, or doors, it is time to schedule a replacement.

Managing Traffic Flow and Productivity

Although it may seem intuitive to purchase and install the most secure, tightly fitting doors in your food production facility, there are additional considerations. One of the most significant is traffic flow/productivity.

Some models of tightly fitting storage doors open slowly or are challenging to enter when using a forklift or other motorized device. Your facility's doors should allow for both easy and safe navigation and efficient temperature controls. Striking a balance between these qualities is also necessary to ensure worker and product safety.

Convection, Conduction, and Defrost System Costs

The three top factors influencing freezer opening costs are convection, conduction, and defrost system costs. The first two terms — convection and conduction — refer to how heat enters your cold storage rooms. If either of these processes remains uncontrolled and left to chance, your facility will likely pay $1,000s more per year in cooling costs. Additionally, if a defrost system is needed to keep ice off your cold storage doors, this will add to your overall operational costs.

Solution: Efficient Cold Storage and Freezer Door

Well-made and efficient cold storage and freezer doors help to protect food processing and production facilities by:

• Improving overall operational efficiency
• Reducing energy costs (sometimes by $1,000s per year)
• Regulating facility temperature
• Preventing product spoilage
• Increasing productivity and employee safety
• Reducing heat transfer
• Improving operations
• Increasing product longevity

Rite-Hite's line of high-speed freezer doors and insulated cold room doors help maintain product integrity through adequate R values, tight seals, and efficiently defrost systems. This combination of features reduces the cost of convection, conduction, and defrosting while increasing productivity and improving operational efficiency.

Some of the most popular options we offer to food production facilities are the innovative Thermal-Flex Sealing System and InsulMax R-4 curtain. However, the best fit will depend mainly on your facility's design and your organization's specific needs and requirements.

Ready to see which cold storage and freezer doors are best suited to your food production facility? Contact a representative today to learn more.

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