Overseas Versus Local Manufacturing: Industrial and Manufacturing Blogs

Whether you run a small corner shop or a sprawling supermarket complex, display fridges are vital pieces of equipment for keeping your perishable food and drink items selling. These fridges display your products to the best effect while keeping them safe from spoilage for extended periods, and are a particularly welcome site for many a sweltering customer during the punishing summers.

However, display fridges are available in a vast array of sizes, configurations and capacities, and choosing the model that best suits your selling needs can be a challenge. To help ensure you pick the best display fridge for the job in hand, make sure to answer the following key questions before you buy or hire your next fridge:

Should I choose a chest or vertical display fridge?

Most display fridges on offer are available in one of two basic configurations; chest fridges, which are wider than they are tall and open from the top, and vertical freezers which are taller, slimmer and feature front-opening doors. Both of these types of fridges work best under specific circumstances.

Chest freezers, generally speaking, boast high capacity per square foot of floor space used, and their compact design helps reduce heat exchange and keep the fridges motor running more efficiently. This makes them ideal for storing large quantities of items, particularly identical or bulk-buy items that do not all need to be displayed at once. Smaller chest fridges are also highly portable, and are used by many businesses operating in more compact quarters.

Vertical fridges may not have the capacity or energy efficiency of chest fridges, but they make up for these shortcomings by displaying a much wider variety of items in one go. Crucially, these fridges reach eye level of all but the most towering customers. This combination of factors makes vertical fridges ideal for displaying wider varieties of items (such as many varieties of cold drinks), and they are especially useful for displaying impulse-buy items (such as ice creams) that need to enjoy total visibility to sell well. 

How energy efficient is the display fridge?

The energy efficiency of your new fridge is a particularly important quality for a small business, where every dollar added to your energy bills counts. As previously mentioned, chest display fridges tend to be more energy efficient than their vertical cousins, but this is far from a universal quality, and you should carefully inspect the efficiency rating of any display fridge before you hire or buy.

Is the display fridge portable?

Moving display fridges from one area of your business to the next as demands change can be a remarkably effective way to keep your sales figures high, and portability is particularly important if you only have one or two display fridges to work with.

With this in mind, many display fridges are fitted with built-in castors for ease of movement. However, you should bear in mind that these refrigerators are sometimes less powerful than immobile models, and can be somewhat dangerous to move if moved while heavily loaded -- if you are in the market for a large amount of fridges for displaying many items, it may be more advisable to go without the luxury of portability.