FORECOURTS AND CONVENIENCE STORES
Food to go – the chilling facts
Karl Hodgson, sales director at Adande, examines trends in the food to go market in forecourt and convenience retailing, with specific reference to refrigeration.
S
ustained growth in the snacking market, together with consumer appetite for increasingly varied and exotic food to go, has led to significant profit opportunities for convenience retailers and forecourt outlets. Long gone are the days when customers were content with a sandwich and a cold drink. Today’s diner on the move expects to be able to buy freshly cooked hot snacks, such as pizzas, burgers, hot filled rolls, pastries, breakfast items and chips, as well as hot drinks.
To meet these demands, retailers are establishing self- contained, pop up foodservice stations within their stores. Food quality and speed of service are the key drivers in the design of these units and typically the foodservice stations will comprise all of the elements associated with the storage, preparation, cooking and service of snacks. Like any foodservice operation, refrigeration is a key element in food to go stations, ensuring that product is kept fresh and food safe.
There are a number of factors to address in specifying refrigeration equipment for food to go operations, in convenience and forecourt stores and an increasing number of forward thinking retailers are adopting horizontal container type refrigeration equipment to meet these criteria.
Ergonomics
Available sales floor area is frequently at a premium in convenience stores, dictating that foodservice stations are compact and make optimum use of space. For this reason, small footprint, large capacity drawer refrigeration units, rather than conventional upright chillers and freezers, are particularly suitable for such applications. The drawers may
30 June 2017
be located under counters or free standing models may have other equipment, such as convection ovens, mounted upon them in space saving configurations. The fact that drawer units may located within the foodservice station means raw product is readily to hand and operators do not need to leave the workstation to fetch product from a remote storage room, promoting efficiency and speed of service.
Food quality and safety
EC Regulation 852/2004 and The Food Safety and Hygiene (England) Regulations 2013 state that foods likely to support the growth of pathogenic micro-organisms or the formation of toxins should be held at or below +8°C.
The frequent opening of conventional upright refrigerators leads to cold air spilling from the cabinet with a detrimental impact on the holding temperature, which can have an effect on food safety and quality. By contrast, horizontal refrigerated drawer systems work on the principle that cold air is denser than warm air, meaning that the temperature within the drawers is maintained even after frequent and prolonged openings.
Accurate and stable holding temperatures have positive implications for the safe storage of food over extended periods, reducing the amount of product which may be price discounted or thrown away due to deterioration in appearance or quality.
Sustainability
Sustainability and running costs remain high on the agenda for retailers. The introduction of EU labelling regulations for professional equipment in 2017 has, to some degree,
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