If you work in a frozen pallet storage, you need to handle frozen food on pallets and freezer spacers. Discover in this article an advanced solution that will help your frozen food warehouse for exchanging pallets and inserting freezer spacers.
Preserve the ingredients in the frozen food warehouse
There are many frozen food warehousing companies also coming up behind the scenes that are also playing a very important role in frozen pallet storage, storing all these frozen foods where the focus is more on preserving the ingredients and flavors and also maintaining labor efficiency for maintaining the storage costs down.
Therefore, a need has arisen for different storage equipment to complement both manufacturers as well as warehouse service providers.
The manufacturers need to keep their products preserved and protected before they decide to send them to the warehouse and products must be handled safely and quickly.
Equipments for any frozen pallet storage
All equipment varieties that are required for this purpose will demand the facility to maintain the temperature below freezing point and also the necessary technologies like drives, sensors, and different electrical controls to function reliably while the temperature may be as low as –28⁰°C.
Let us discuss a few important types of equipment that you will need for the efficient running of any frozen pallet storage
Pallet changer in frozen food warehouse
The most essential requirement of any pallet changer is its ability to tilt at any angle that is needed for effective operation. There must be facilities available in the equipment to change the angle of tilt to any value as needed for a certain application.
This can facilitate in easily separating the load for your freeze spacers removal or during the pallet change operation.
Also, these pallet changers must have a certain innovative mobile solution. Since it will be on a motorized conveyor system, which is controlled by various levers and buttons so that the operator can handle the load to easily operate the equipment while inserting or removing any freeze spacers.
Freezer spacers in frozen pallet storage
Another piece of equipment is the freezer spacers which also play an important role, particularly in the industry that is dealing with frozen food and frozen pallet storage.
All these spacers will be needed to minimize the freeze time of the product as a result, you can save your utility costs.
While using these spacers, between layers of products cold air can be allowed to move so that consistent freezing can be obtained for the entire pallet load.
After the products will reach a certain desired temperature, one can easily remove the spacers placed between stacks of products.
Most of the pallets that were used before were made of wood and not plastic. Although the purpose of both remains the same, however, wooden pallets are susceptible to mold, rot, or insects in due course of time.
Therefore, in such an environment usually, plastic freezer spacers will always be preferred. All of such concerns, especially in the industry that deals with frozen food, because food contamination can totally screw up the products, and the company may suffer a loss.
Guidelines for frozen food warehouse and cold storage
Before we discuss a few key types of equipment, it is important to know a few guidelines for frozen food warehouse. If you need to deal anytime with food and a specific temperature, then you must follow certain guidelines:
1. Capacity
Most warehouses are very concerned with capacity, particularly when frozen foods and cold storage is considered. It is important as product capacity must match the storage facility space.
Besides, because of the refrigeration needed for keeping all the products at the right temperature hence the ratio of refrigeration to space must be precise.
Also, sufficient space between walls and stacks will ensure airflow is maximized.
2. Temperature
The next is regarding the storage temperature of your storage facility. Besides ensuring the correct ratio of refrigeration to capacity, it is necessary to maintain the right air temperature for any frozen foods stored in the facility.
When it comes to storage in the frozen food warehouse, temperature-monitoring is of critical importance. The temperatures must be recorded continuously in order to ensure the safety of perishable goods. They usually use 2 separate systems to ensure accuracy in temperature readings.
3. Refrigeration
Also, after ensuring the right size of your refrigeration equipment as per the frozen food warehouse size and that the close monitoring of temperature, the refrigeration equipment must have an alarm system so that it can activate when the equipment fails due to any reason.
4. Material handling in frozen food warehouse
There must be suitable material handling and packaging operations such as casing and palletizing must be done with your cold storage facility in your cold storage area for reducing frozen food exposure to any heat or humidity source that can ultimately affect the product quality.
When any items have to be moved from storage to shipment or vice versa, then frozen food must be moved quickly through certain loading areas that may not be refrigerated.
5. Shipments
Whenever any new shipment of frozen products will arrive at the warehousing facility, it is important to check the temperature.
If any frozen foods are found to be at a temperature of 10 °F or higher or the product got damaged in any way, the operator must notify a manager to ensure special handling depending on the product condition.
Before accepting the shipments for storage, they must be coded for the organization to identify them.
Pallet retrievers in frozen food warehouse
As pallets are one of the integral parts of the frozen food warehouses, this big piece of equipment will help you for:
- Increasing the freezer spacers
- Combining loads
- Safely and efficiently changing out pallets.
The alternatives to such pallet retrievers will be more manual labor or the use of forklifts that may not be exactly designed for this purpose.
Both of these methods can take significantly more time and produce an unsafe environment. Upgrading from a certain manual labor process can also help improve the bottom line, as a pallet retriever’s efficiency is something unmatched by any human hand.
The pallet change operation can take place due to tinting mode at a 90 ° to 95 ° angle. This angle is variable as per your type of product. It can allow you to easily separate your load for the pallet change operation or freezer spacers removal, fundamental in frozen food warehouse.
This pallet changer also has an innovative mobile solution.
It has a motorized conveyor system, which is controlled by levers and buttons, which enables the handling of the load and makes it easier for the operation of removal and insertion of the freeze spacers.
Stretch wrappers
Stretch wrappers can provide an efficient way of unitizing and securing pallet loads with plastic film. Particularly, in the frozen food industry, such stretch wrap influences the rate at which food defrosts and freezes, hence selecting the best wrap and also the best tool will help you wrap, which is especially important.
Stretch wrappers are available in different sizes, starting with portable units that may come ready for navigating large frozen food warehouses.
Which particular type of stretch wrapper that you need will depend upon your specifications like:
- How much space that you have
- What is your maximum load size
- What is your production speed.
There are several options available that will offer you an opportunity to streamline all your logistics needed for frozen foods.
Whatever details you may be looking for, you must be aware that using any form of stretch wrapper has several advantages. For instance, if you are thinking of using a stretch wrapper instead of hand wrapping, your bottom line will undoubtedly change.
Stretch wrappers reduce the amount of time spent on human labor and utilize at least 30% less film, saving you money on materials as per frozen pallet storage operation.
The exact method how to apply plastic wrap may differ based on the stretch wrapper type that you have, such equipment is built for helping you wrap all pallet loads faster and with additional tension given on the plastic wrap, which can protect your food products from damage as well as theft.
Irrespective of whether you are a big player or a small one, if you are looking for a solution for the storage of your frozen food warehouse, then you need to do thorough research on all the above equipment.
