The Five Benefits of Blast Chilling

I recently came across an article on Food Safety, and found it had all the important points of correct food temperature storage, ensuring food is cooked through, safe food handling tips for good hygiene practice, eliminate cross contamination etc, but it made no mention of a crucial part of food safety that is too often left out of the conversation: ensuring your Cooked Food is efficiently blast chilled to get it through the HACCP Danger Zone as quick as possible.

So I’d like to clearly explain the Benefits of Blast Chilling your food products, but before I do, let’s just run through how a blast chiller actually works.

Blast chillers are designed & engineered to blow chilled air at a high velocity to rapidly cool cooked food product and bring the core temperature down through the danger zone (60ºC – 5ºC) much faster than would occur in a standard conventional commercial refrigerated chiller or freezer.

Here are the top Five Benefits of Blast Chilling your food products:

1 – OPTIMAL FOOD SAFETY: At around 37°C, the number of bacteria doubles every 20 minutes. Blast chillers cross this temperature danger zone range as quickly as possible, taking the core temperature of the food under 3°C in less than 90 minutes, and -18°C in less than 240 minutes. This drastically reduces the quantity of bacteria in food after cooking to a minimum.

2 – IMPROVED FOOD QUALITY: By rapidly cooling your food, you are capturing all of the original organoleptic properties of the food, harnessing it’s colour, texture, moisture content, nutrients and most importantly, it’s flavours. Once regenerated for consumption, your food will taste just like it was freshly cooked.

3 – LESS WEIGHT LOSS: After cooking, food releases moisture by evaporation. Blast chilling immediately after cooking stops evaporation, therefore reducing the loss of water & moisture content from your product, thus ensuring you get more value from your food & ingredients purchases. If your product is sold by weight, revenue can be increased by up to 7%!

4 – WASTE REDUCTION: Blast chilling increases the shelf life of your food product, ensuring you have more time allowance to serve/sell/allocate your food products, resulting in a large reduction of waste, meaning less money being thrown away.

5 – TIME, ENERGY & LABOUR SAVINGS: By using a Blast Chiller, your food is ready sooner for the next stage in your process. You may be able to cook, chill, pack & despatch on the same day, rather than having to wait hours or over-night, giving you the ability to process rush orders. Also, as Blast Chillers are designed to rapidly cool food, they perform the task efficiently, ensuring you avoid putting large heat-loads into coolrooms & fridges that are only purposed for cold storage, placing additional stress on their refrigeration systems, reducing equipment life-spans and increasing your energy use.

Our AFINOX Blast Chillers are available from small Reach-In units, to larger Roll-In models, to our much larger Tunnel & Pass-Through Systems, so there is a model to suit any sized kitchen or production facility.

If you’d like more information, please Get In Touch. We can offer in depth advice on Blast Chilling & Freezing your product, including indicative cooling times, as well as assist with other facets, such as recommended containers/vessels, refrigeration chain etc.