What a supermarket or convenience store needs
- Chilled aisle: multideck chillers, usually with doors, for dairy, meat, ready meals and sandwiches at 0 to +4 °C. The metres you need follow your sales mix: a small convenience store might run 5 to 8 m, a supermarket several runs fed from a plant room.
- Frozen: glass-door upright freezers for frozen food and ice cream at -18 to -22 °C, or island freezers where you sell frozen in volume.
- Produce: an open or tiered fruit and veg display at +8 to +12 °C, with misting or humidity control where you sell leafy greens and herbs.
- Drinks: glass-door drinks chillers and impulse coolers near the till, sized for restocking twice a day in a busy store.
- Back of house: a walk-in cold room, typically 10 to 30 m², and a freezer room sized to your delivery schedule rather than your shelf space.
Our shop fitting page covers the shelving, counters and checkouts that go around the refrigeration, and the multideck choices in more depth.
Fruit and veg displays for greengrocers and supermarkets
Produce needs a warmer, more humid display than dairy. An open multideck or a tiered fruit and veg display running at +8 to +12 °C keeps leaves crisp and skins firm, and misting or humidity control extends that by a day or more for salads and herbs. Bananas and some tropical fruit are kept out of the chiller altogether. Position produce cabinets away from freezers and the entrance so they do not run too cold, and give them good lighting: colour sells fruit and veg. See our fruit and veg display guide.
Doors, energy and running costs
Refrigeration is often the largest part of a food shop's electricity bill. Glass doors on multidecks cut a cabinet's energy use by a third or more and keep the aisle warmer for shoppers; night blinds do some of the same job on open cabinets after closing. LED lighting adds less heat to the cabinet than fluorescent tubes. For a store with more than a handful of cabinets, remote refrigeration, with condensing units on the roof or in a plant area, is quieter, cooler on the shop floor and cheaper to run than a row of plug-in cabinets, and heat recovery can warm the store or its hot water from the heat the plant rejects anyway. We show these options and their payback in the quotation rather than leaving them out to look cheaper.
Walk-in cold rooms for retail stock
The stockroom cold room is where deliveries land and where the chilled aisle is restocked from, so it is sized to the delivery schedule, not to the shelf space. Most convenience stores need a chilled room of 10 to 30 m² and a smaller freezer room; supermarkets add a produce room and sometimes a separate dairy room. Rooms are modular and built to fit the stockroom you have. See cold rooms and freezer rooms.
Refits and retrofits while you trade
Supermarket work usually happens in stores that are open. We replace cabinets run by run, usually overnight or early in the morning, so chilled stock moves from the old cabinet to the new one in the same shift; we fit doors to existing multidecks; and we replace failing plant without closing the shop. A full refit is planned in phases with you so the tills never stop.
Compliance for food retailers
- Chilled food must be kept at 8 °C or below by law in England; cabinets are set to 0 to +4 °C with the probe positions that prove it.
- Temperatures are recorded for your HACCP plan; digital controllers and remote monitoring can log every cabinet automatically.
- Refrigerant is handled by F-Gas certified engineers, and remote systems have leak checks and records at the intervals the regulations set.
Why supermarkets and convenience stores choose Alaska Cold
- Refrigeration, shelving and the cold room are planned together on one layout, so the chilled aisle, the stockroom and the electrics work as one.
- Cabinets specified for your sales mix, with doors and energy options costed honestly.
- Installation in phases, overnight where needed, so the store keeps trading.
- 24/7 repairs and maintenance contracts once you are open, because a chilled aisle down on a Saturday is lost sales as well as lost stock.
Opening a store, adding chilled lines or replacing tired cabinets? Request a free quote and we will arrange a survey.
