Cool Room Buying Guide for Australian Businesses

What Is a Cool Room?

A cool room, sometimes called a cold room, walk-in fridge or walk-in refrigerator, is an insulated refrigerated room designed to maintain chilled products at a controlled temperature.

Commercial cool rooms are commonly used for storing:

• Fresh meat and poultry
• Seafood
• Dairy products
• Fruit and vegetables
• Prepared ingredients
• Sauces and condiments
• Drinks
• Desserts
• Packaged chilled foods
• Bulk ingredients

A cool room is different from a freezer room.

Cool rooms are generally designed for chilled storage, while freezer rooms operate at much lower temperatures and require refrigeration equipment and insulation suitable for frozen storage.

For potentially hazardous food, Australian food-safety requirements generally require food to be kept at 5°C or colder during storage, unless the business can demonstrate that another temperature is safe.

Do You Actually Need a Cool Room?

Not every food business needs one.

A small café, takeaway or restaurant with regular deliveries may be better served by a combination of quality upright and under-bench commercial fridges.

A cool room starts to become particularly useful when:

• Existing refrigerators are regularly running out of space
• You receive large or less frequent deliveries
• You buy ingredients in bulk
• Stock is spread across too many separate cabinets
• Your business is expanding
• You need better organisation of chilled stock
• Staff spend too much time searching through multiple refrigerators
• Peak periods require considerably more cold storage than normal
  
  

Businesses that commonly use cool rooms include restaurants, hotels, pubs, clubs, caterers, bakeries, supermarkets, grocers, butchers, delis and food production facilities.

Before committing, compare the cost and usable storage of a cool room with additional commercial refrigerators. For some smaller businesses, another upright fridge may still be the more practical solution.

How Big Should Your Cool Room Be?

One of the most common mistakes is choosing a room based only on how much stock you have today.

A cool room that is completely full from the day it is installed leaves little room for busy periods, larger deliveries or business growth.

Start by thinking about your maximum stock level, rather than your average stock level.

Consider:

Delivery Frequency

A restaurant receiving fresh produce every day may need considerably less standing storage than a butcher or caterer receiving one or two large deliveries each week.

Peak Trading Periods

Think about weekends, Christmas, Easter, events, functions and other periods when your stock requirements increase.

Product Variety

Twenty different ingredients generally need more usable shelving space than the same volume of only two or three products.

Future Growth

If you expect the business to grow, allow some spare storage capacity now. Expanding an existing cool room later can be considerably more complicated than allowing additional capacity from the start.

Working Space

Don’t calculate capacity using the external dimensions alone.

Staff need enough room to safely:

• Walk inside
• Access shelving
• Move cartons
• Use trolleys where required
• Open the door
• Rotate stock
• Clean floors and shelving
  
  

A cool room can look large on a floor plan but feel very small once shelving and stock are installed.

Cool Room Size and Refrigeration Capacity Are Not the Same Thing

This is an important distinction.

Knowing the dimensions of the room does not automatically tell you what refrigeration unit you need.

The refrigeration system needs to be selected according to the total heat load of the room.

Factors can include:

• Internal room dimensions
• Required operating temperature
• Panel construction and insulation thickness
• Ambient temperature surrounding the room
• Indoor or outdoor installation
• Number of door openings per day
• Door dimensions
• Lighting
• Number of people entering the room
• Quantity of stock loaded each day
• Temperature of incoming stock
• Product type
• Evaporator location
• Condenser location
  
  

For example, a cool room mainly holding cartons of drinks that arrive already chilled may have a very different refrigeration requirement from a butcher or commercial kitchen loading significant quantities of warmer product into the room every day.

This is why refrigeration capacity should be properly calculated rather than chosen simply from the room’s length and width.

Types of Commercial Cool Rooms

Modular Cool Rooms

Modular cool rooms are assembled from prefabricated insulated panels.

They are popular because different combinations of panels can be used to create a room that suits the available space.

Depending on the design, modular cool rooms may also be easier to dismantle or alter than a room that has been permanently incorporated into the building.

They are commonly used in:

• Restaurants
• Cafés
• Butcher shops
• Supermarkets
• Commercial kitchens
• Pubs
• Catering facilities

Custom or Built-In Cool Rooms

A custom cool room can be designed around a particular building layout.

This may be useful when:

• The available area is an unusual shape
• Structural columns need to be accommodated
• Specific door locations are required
• A larger food-production area is being constructed
• The room is being incorporated into a complete kitchen or supermarket fit-out

Outdoor Cool Rooms

Where suitable indoor space isn’t available, some businesses install an external cool room.

Outdoor installations require additional consideration of weather exposure, drainage, ventilation, condensing-unit location and local site conditions.

Always discuss the installation requirements with appropriately qualified contractors before purchasing equipment.

Cool Room Panels: What Does the Insulation Do?

The insulated panels form the walls and ceiling—and, depending on the installation, the floor—of the cool room.

Their job is to reduce heat transfer between the surrounding environment and the refrigerated space.

Common insulation materials include:

EPS

Expanded polystyrene, or EPS, is widely used in insulated panel construction and can be an economical option for suitable applications.

PIR

Polyisocyanurate, or PIR, offers strong thermal performance and is used where particular insulation and fire-performance characteristics are required.

PU

Polyurethane, commonly referred to as PU, also provides high thermal insulation performance and is widely used in refrigerated panel systems.

There isn’t one panel material or thickness that is automatically right for every cool room.

Panel selection should consider:

• Target temperature
• Room dimensions
• Location
• Ambient temperature
• Fire and building requirements
• Refrigeration design
• Whether the room is chilled or frozen
  
  

A cool room in a hot commercial kitchen or tropical Australian location can have very different heat loads from an equivalent room in a cooler environment.

Self-Contained vs Remote Refrigeration

The insulated room itself doesn’t create cold. You also need a properly sized refrigeration system.

Two common arrangements are self-contained refrigeration and remote refrigeration.

Self-Contained Refrigeration

A packaged or self-contained system keeps much of the refrigeration equipment together at or close to the cool room.

Advantages can include:

• Simpler installation
• Less refrigeration pipework
• Suitable for many smaller installations
• Convenient servicing access depending on the layout

However, you need to think carefully about where the heat from the condenser goes.

Remote Refrigeration

With a remote refrigeration system, the condensing unit is installed away from the evaporator—for example outdoors, on a roof or in another suitable location.

This can help remove compressor and condenser heat and noise from the immediate kitchen or storage area.

Remote systems are commonly considered for:

• Larger cool rooms
• Busy commercial kitchens
• Installations where indoor heat is already high
• Locations where noise needs to be minimised

Neither arrangement is automatically more efficient in every installation. Performance depends on correct equipment selection, refrigeration load, pipework, ventilation, ambient temperature, installation quality and maintenance.

Where Will the Condenser Heat Go?

This is one of the most overlooked parts of planning a cool room.

A refrigeration system doesn’t simply “make cold”. It removes heat from inside the cool room and releases that heat through the condenser.

If a condensing unit is installed in a small, poorly ventilated area, the surrounding temperature can rise and make the refrigeration equipment work harder.

When planning the installation, discuss:

• Condenser location
• Available ventilation
• Manufacturer-required clearances
• Surrounding ambient temperature
• Access for cleaning and servicing
• Heat discharge
• Noise

The cheapest location to install the refrigeration unit is not always the best location for long-term operation.

Flooring: Do You Need an Insulated Cool Room Floor?

The correct flooring depends on the design of the room and its operating conditions.

Possible arrangements include:

• Insulated panel floors
• Existing concrete slabs
• Recessed or flush-mounted floors
• Raised floors with access ramps

Consider:

• Trolley traffic
• Load capacity
• Cleaning
• Drainage
• Slip resistance
• Door threshold height
• Insulation requirements
• Access for staff
• Pallet movement where applicable

A raised insulated floor may provide excellent thermal separation but may also require a ramp, which changes how staff and trolleys enter the room.

Plan this before ordering the room rather than after installation.

Plan the Door Around Your Workflow

The cool room door is another detail that can have a surprisingly large impact on daily operations.

Think about:

• Which direction it should open
• How wide it needs to be
• Trolley access
• Nearby benches and equipment
• Delivery routes
• Staff traffic
• Self-closing operation
• Door seals
• Safety release mechanisms
• Strip curtains for frequently accessed rooms

Imagine the busiest delivery of your week.

Can a staff member easily move the largest box or trolley through the doorway without hitting surrounding equipment?

That’s a better test than simply asking whether a person can walk through it.

Shelving and Airflow Matter

A large cool room is only useful if the storage layout works.

Plan shelving before the room is installed.

Good shelving should provide enough room for stock while allowing cold air to circulate around the room.

Avoid:

• Packing cartons tightly around the evaporator
• Blocking fans or airflow
• Overcrowding shelves
• Storing stock directly where it interferes with the door
• Making shelves so deep that products disappear at the back

Your shelving arrangement should also support appropriate food separation and stock rotation.

Raw foods such as meat should be managed so they cannot contaminate ready-to-eat products.

What Temperature Should a Commercial Cool Room Run At?

For potentially hazardous foods, Australian food businesses generally need to maintain food at 5°C or colder during storage unless they have a validated alternative system.

Many cool rooms are therefore operated below the 5°C limit to provide some operational margin for door openings, defrost cycles and stock loading.

However, the correct set point depends on what you are storing.

For example, the ideal conditions for:

• Meat
• Dairy
• Produce
• Beverages
• Prepared food

may not always be exactly the same.

Your refrigeration contractor or food-safety adviser can help determine an appropriate operating range for your particular products.

Don’t Rely Only on the Cool Room Display

The temperature shown on the refrigeration controller tells you about the refrigeration system’s sensed temperature.

It doesn’t necessarily tell you the temperature of every product stored inside the room.

FSANZ recommends checking potentially hazardous food with a suitable probe thermometer and specifically advises businesses not to rely solely on fixed temperature gauges on refrigeration equipment.

For businesses handling potentially hazardous food, a suitable thermometer should therefore form part of normal food-safety procedures.

You may also want to consider:

• Digital temperature logging
• High-temperature alarms
• Remote monitoring
• Door-open alarms
• Documented temperature checks

Requirements vary according to the type of food business and applicable food-safety program.

Is a Cool Room the Same as a Blast Chiller?

No.

A cool room is primarily designed to store chilled products and maintain temperature.

A blast chiller is specifically designed to remove heat from cooked food quickly.

This distinction is important for restaurants, caterers, bakeries and food production businesses cooling significant quantities of cooked food.

Australian food-safety requirements state that potentially hazardous cooked food being cooled for later use should generally be cooled:

60°C → 21°C within 2 hours

then:

21°C → 5°C within the following 4 hours.

FSANZ lists rapid-cooling equipment such as blast chillers as one method businesses can use to achieve rapid cooling.

Loading large quantities of hot food into a normal cool room can also increase the temperature of the room and place additional load on the refrigeration system.

If rapid food cooling forms part of your production process, consider whether a commercial blast chiller is more appropriate for that task.

What Information Do You Need to Get a Cool Room Quote?

The more information you provide upfront, the easier it is for a supplier or refrigeration contractor to recommend the correct solution.

Before requesting a quote, try to provide:

If possible, supply a simple floor plan or sketch showing the available area, doorways and surrounding equipment.

How Much Does a Cool Room Cost?

There isn’t a particularly useful one-size-fits-all cool room price.

Two rooms with identical external dimensions can have very different installed costs depending on:

• Panel construction
• Insulation thickness
• Refrigeration capacity
• Self-contained or remote system
• Refrigeration pipe runs
• Flooring
• Door specification
• Shelving
• Electrical work
• Drainage
• Outdoor weather protection
• Delivery access
• Installation location
• Freight
• Site preparation

When comparing cool room quotes, look beyond the final dollar figure.

Ask suppliers to clearly identify what is included.

A quote might include the panels and refrigeration equipment but exclude electrical connection, drainage, shelving, commissioning or building work.

Comparing like for like is far more useful than simply choosing the cheapest headline price.

Installation: What Should Be Checked Before Ordering?

Cool room installation is much easier when site requirements are resolved beforehand.

Check:

Floor

Is the installation surface level and capable of supporting the room and its contents?

Power

What electrical supply does the refrigeration equipment require?

Do not assume every cool room operates from a standard power point.

Drainage

Does the refrigeration equipment require drainage, and where will that water go?

Delivery Access

Can the panels and refrigeration equipment physically reach the installation location?

Check:

• Door widths
• Corridors
• Stairs
• Lifts
• Loading areas
• Ceiling heights

Refrigeration Location

Where will the evaporator and condensing unit be mounted?

Ventilation

Can the condenser reject heat properly?

Service Access

Can a refrigeration technician reach the important components later without dismantling half the room?

Good service access can make future maintenance considerably easier.

Energy Efficiency: Think Beyond the Compressor

Energy consumption depends on the complete installation.

Things that can influence running costs include:

• Panel insulation
• Door openings
• Damaged seals
• Refrigeration system sizing
• Condenser ventilation
• Ambient temperature
• Dirty condenser coils
• Ice build-up
• Stock loading
• Airflow
• Lighting
• Temperature setting

Simply buying the refrigeration unit with the lowest quoted wattage does not necessarily give you the most economical cool room.

Correct design and installation are usually more important.

Cool Room Maintenance

A cool room is a major business asset, and routine maintenance can help protect both the equipment and the stock inside.

Regularly check:

• Door seals
• Door alignment
• Evaporator airflow
• Condenser cleanliness
• Ice build-up
• Drain lines
• Temperature readings
• Alarm systems
• Shelving
• Lighting
• Panel joints

Grease and dust can quickly build up on refrigeration equipment in commercial kitchens.

A dirty condenser may reduce heat rejection and make the refrigeration system work harder.

Have the refrigeration system serviced according to the manufacturer’s and refrigeration contractor’s recommendations.

What Happens During a Power Failure?

Businesses carrying high-value refrigerated stock should have a plan for refrigeration failures and power outages.

Depending on the business, this may include:

• Keeping the cool room door closed
• Temperature alarms
• Monitoring food temperature
• Alternative refrigerated storage
• Emergency stock transfer procedures
• Appropriately sized standby generation
• Contact details for refrigeration service technicians

Avoid assuming that a standard computer-style UPS will run a commercial refrigeration system during an extended outage.

The appropriate backup solution depends on the refrigeration equipment and electrical load.

Common Cool Room Buying Mistakes

Buying Too Small

A room with no spare capacity can become restrictive surprisingly quickly.

Choosing Refrigeration by Room Dimensions Alone

The products being loaded, ambient temperature and usage pattern matter too.

Ignoring Condenser Ventilation

Poor heat rejection can affect refrigeration performance.

Forgetting Delivery Access

Panels and equipment still need to physically reach the installation area.

Not Planning Shelving Early

Poor shelving design can waste a surprising amount of usable storage space.

Ignoring the Door Location

A badly positioned door can interfere with kitchen workflow every day.

Comparing Quotes Only by Price

Make sure you understand what equipment and installation work are actually included.

Using a Cool Room for Rapid Cooling Without Checking Its Capacity

A normal storage cool room is not automatically a substitute for equipment specifically designed to rapidly chill cooked food.