COVER STORYFANS
Is reactive refrigeration maintenance still fi t for purpose?
For food producers, refrigeration failure has never been a minor inconvenience. But as energy costs remain under pressure, refrigeration infrastructure ages and the industry continue to navigate a changing refrigerant landscape, the consequences of poor-performing plant are becoming harder to absorb.
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ncreasingly, connected refrigeration technology off ers another approach: using live and historical operating data to understand how plant is performing, identify changes in behaviour and make better-informed decisions about maintenance and optimisation. For food producers, this could represent an important shift –
from maintaining refrigeration when something goes wrong to actively managing its performance throughout its working life. Recent events have underlined just how dependent the food supply chain is on reliable refrigeration. The UK’s 2026 heatwave put signifi cant pressure on cold-chain infrastructure, with concerns raised about ageing refrigeration systems struggling to cope with extreme temperatures. The episode highlighted a wider issue for the industry: equipment that may appear to be operating satisfactorily under normal conditions can have far less resilience when pushed towards its design limits.
For individual food manufacturers and processors, the same principle applies at a smaller scale. A refrigeration system may continue to run while gradually becoming less effi cient, operating further from its optimum conditions or requiring increasing levels of intervention. By the time a fault becomes obvious, the underlying problem may already have been developing for some time.
Moving beyond the maintenance snapshot Traditional planned maintenance remains essential. Engineers need to inspect equipment, carry out preventative work and ensure systems remain safe and compliant. However, a service visit is inevitably a snapshot of performance. Connected refrigeration provides the opportunity to build a much more complete picture by capturing information while equipment is operating under diff erent loads and conditions. The important point is not simply having access to more data. It is knowing what that data means. For example, monitoring compressor performance against
its operating envelope can help establish whether equipment is operating as expected. Comparing current conditions with historical data can reveal changes that might otherwise go unnoticed. This can give engineers another layer of information when diagnosing problems and, potentially, allow issues to be investigated before they develop into a costly failure.
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management This changes the role of refrigeration monitoring. Rather than asking only whether a system is running, operators can begin asking more useful questions, which is the diff erence between monitoring and intelligence. The objective is not to replace the engineer. It is to give the engineer better information. Remote access to operating data can help establish what is happening before an engineer arrives on site, potentially making fault diagnosis more targeted and reducing the time required to identify a problem. For food producers, where refrigeration can be directly linked to product quality, production continuity and food safety, that additional information has a clear operational value. The UK’s HFC phase-down continues to shape the
refrigeration market, with the current GB trajectory requiring signifi cant reductions in HFC use and further changes expected to be considered as the industry looks towards the longer term. The Government confi rmed in May 2026 that the existing phase-down steps would remain in place for 2027 while further work on the future trajectory continues.
The next generation of refrigeration maintenance The refrigeration industry is not moving from maintenance to technology. It is moving towards using technology to make maintenance more eff ective. Experienced engineers will remain central to diagnosis, servicing and system optimisation. What is changing is the information available to them. Connected refrigeration can provide a continuous stream
of evidence about how equipment is performing, helping contractors and end users move from a reactive model towards more informed, proactive management. For food producers, the prize is potentially signifi cant: fewer surprises, better- informed maintenance decisions, improved system effi ciency and greater resilience. Ultimately, the question is no longer simply whether
refrigeration is working, it is whether operators have enough visibility to know how well it is working, whether that performance is changing, and what they can do about it before the problem becomes critical.
"Connected refrigeration provides the opportunity to build a much more complete picture by capturing information while
equipment is operating under diff erent loads and conditions. The important point is not simply having access to more data. It is knowing what that data means."
www.acr-news.com • October 2026 9
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