Building Your Dream Apartment

Two tips for restaurant owners who are having freezer rooms built

28 February 2023

Julian Caldwell

Here are two tips for restaurant owners who are about to embark on freezer room construction projects.

They should ensure the floor spaces between the freezer room's shelves allow for several staff members to walk past each other

When having their freezer room designed, a restaurant owner should ask the contractor to ensure that, when the shelving units are in place, there will still be sufficient floor space for the kitchen staff to walk by one another. The reason for this is that, in a restaurant that is large and busy enough to require a freezer room, it's likely that several of the kitchen staff may need to grab items from the freezer room at the same time. If the spaces between the room's shelves are so narrow that they have to squeeze by each other or if one staff member has to wait for their co-worker to reemerge from the freezer room before they can get what they need, then this could lead to the kitchen staff not prepping food at the fast pace they usually do.

Furthermore, in a restaurant freezer room, staff members may need to pick up large, heavy slabs of, for example, frozen meat, and it could be hazardous for them to try to pull such hefty items off a shelf whilst their co-worker is squeezed in beside them, trying to pull another large frozen item off a nearby shelf. This could result in one person bumping into the other and causing them to fall, with the heavy frozen food in their arms, and then land on it and injure themselves. If however, the restaurant owner ensures that their contractor keeps the need for sufficient free floor space in mind when deciding on the built-in shelves' dimensions, they could prevent these issues.

They should consider having wheeled shelf-attached ladders added to their built-in shelves

Restaurant owners involved in freezer construction projects should also consider having their contractors add wheeled, shelf-attached ladders to their built-in shelves. The reason for this is that they may need the shelving in their freezer room to be tall in order to maximise the amount of food they can store in this room. This may then mean that their shorter kitchen staff members will need to use stepladders to pick up or put items on the upper shelves. However, in a freezer room, the floor may have ice on it, which may make it hard for anyone to keep a freestanding stepladder stable on it. A staff member who tries to use a stepladder on this slippery surface may be at risk of falling, due to their stepladder sliding out from under their feet.

If however, the ladder in the freezer room is on lockable wheels and is secured to the built-in shelving units, the staff members will be able to safely stand on it, even if the floor is icy, without worrying that the ladder might slip out from underneath them and cause them to fall. For more information on freezer room construction, contact a professional near you.

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