4 Foods That Require a Chiller During Production

If you’ve ever taken a tour of a food production facility or seen one on television, you know that dozens of different machines are needed to transform raw materials into finished products. While cutters, ovens and packaging devices are integral parts to the assembly line, machinery to rapidly decrease temperatures are vital components for many different dishes. Here are four categories of edible goods that rely on chiller air cooled technology during the manufacturing process.

Baked Goods

There’s nothing that compares to the scent of a freshly baked pie coming out of the oven in your kitchen, but industrial facilities operate on a much larger scale. While you’re able to put your item on the windowsill for cooling, a plant that produces thousands of pies per hour would need quite a few windows to accomplish the same feat. To keep operations moving, bakers use a conveyor belt that takes each product through an air cooled chiller that brings it down to a temperature that’s more appropriate for packaging and shipment.

Meat

Whether you regularly eat beef, pork, poultry or fish, proper handling of meat is a crucial part of food safety procedures. As soon as a butcher starts breaking an animal down into its various pieces, bacteria can set in as part of the natural decay process. Since these microscopic creatures can only operate in a specific temperature range, proper refrigeration is important. For a facility that produces a large volume of parts like steaks, chicken breasts or fish filets, an air cooled chiller works overtime to keep foodborne pathogens at bay.

Fruit and Vegetables

As soon as a farmer harvests a vegetable or ripe piece of fruit, the clock starts ticking. While some items continue to ripen after removal from the plant, all produce eventually spoils if it isn’t eaten in a reasonable period of time. One way that production facilities slow down this process is by flash freezing items using chiller air cooled technology. This is why you can still get vegetables that taste fresh from the freezer case at your local grocery store.

Ice Cream

If you’ve ever made ice cream, gelato, sorbet or any other frigid treats, you know that frozen water is the enemy of a smooth texture. One of the ways that chefs achieve the desired consistency is by lowering the temperature of the custard as much as possible before churning so there’s less of an opportunity for those harmful crystals to form. On an industrial scale, manufacturers use a large air cooled chiller to bring massive batches to near-freezing temperatures for eventual spinning and packaging for shipment.

Controlling the Temperature of Your Food

These are just four types of edible goods that rely on chiller air cooled machinery during the production process, but there are plenty of other consumables that use this technology. Whenever the recipe calls for rapid reduction of temperatures to protect the food’s integrity, these machines are up to the task. Without effective cooling, it wouldn’t be possible to process food on a scale large enough to feed the planet’s burgeoning population.