Commercial Refrigerators and Food Shelf Life: Your Guide

Authorities have estimated that almost two and a half million cases of food poisoning occur every year in the United Kingdom. With this in mind, you need to be careful about the food on your shelves and how safe they are. Lucky for you, food shelf life is a somewhat solved problem.

Read on to find out more about how long foods last while on the shelves. By the end of the article, you should have a good idea of the shelf life of different products and how best to refrigerate foods in your care.

What is Food Shelf Life?

Food producers take pains to produce products that will last a long time. They use packaging, non-reactive gases and preservatives to stop food spoiling. Still, there will be times when the food will react with itself or begin to depreciate in quality.

While food is on the shelf, it will start to lose its characteristics. These may be chemical, functional, physical or microbiological in nature. So they could range in everything from an apple being too squishy to a batch of probiotic yoghurt losing its culture.

In general, food’s labelling informs both the consumer and the seller of when the item has reached the end of its shelf life. Some laws and regulations also limit when you can sell food based on how fast it spoils.

Chilled Food

You should keep chilled food at temperatures of eight degrees or lower. This is not only a recommendation but also the law in the countries of England, Wales and Northern Ireland.

You can achieve this by ensuring any refrigerated displays or storage for chilled goods is set to five degrees centigrade. That way, even the occasional opening of the device to add or remove products will not heat up the inside too much.

As an addition to the above law about chilled food, you should remember that it can only remain out of the refrigeration for up to four hours. If you discover any food that you have not refrigerated for this amount of time, you must throw it away and not sell or provide it to others.

Generally, you should be storing raw food away from food that people can eat without further cooking. If they are in the same locations, place raw food lower down so that any accidental dripping will not end up on the cooked or ready-to-eat food.

Shelf-Stable Foods

Shelf-stable food is safe for storing at room temperature. These are often items that its makers have packaged in such a way to prevent spoilage over a short time, such as jarred or tinned goods.

Once you have opened this packaging, the time limit greatly diminishes. You can find the lifespan of food that you have opened in this manner on its packaging.

Pre-Frozen Foods

If you get foods such as ice cream or other frozen items, make sure to put them in the freezer as soon as they get to your premises. These items can stay for long periods in freezers at lower than minus-eighteen degrees centigrade. This is due to the lack of bacterial growth at this temperature.

These products may still come under the effects of other factors, though, so you should check the spoilage dates on their packaging.

If your freezer or refrigerator operates at higher than minus eighteen degrees centigrade, your food may spoil faster. Check the packaging of the food you are storing for more information in this regard.

For More Information

You should now have a much better idea about how you should be refrigerating your products on the shelf and in storage. The next step would be to seek out a product to meet these needs. We are here to meet those needs.

If you have questions about what kind of refrigeration you need and what we can provide, do not hesitate. Our team is here to give you the answers you need, so pick up the phone and give us a call.