The most recent Food Marketing Institute Expo in Dallas and National Restaurant Association Restaurant-Hotel-Motel Show in Chicago brought out the very latest in ice-making equipment, storage bins, and walk-in freezers and coolers as well as reach-in versions. This roundup of the latest in equipment is culled from both shows.

A well-designed medium temperature refrigeration system will maintain both a proper case temperature and relative humidity (rh). The preservation of food depends not only on the temperature, but also on the relative humidity within a case.

Members of the Hatfield Township community place a high value on locally sourced and organic foods and environmental stewardship. As such, planning for the town’s new ShopRite supermarket included making sustainability a priority from product offerings to construction of the store itself — including the choice of refrigeration systems and display cases.

Minimizing frost accumulations on refrigerator evaporator coils and fins, the Ice*Meister™ Model 9734-REFR optical defrost controller can be used in commercial walk-in refrigerators and reach-in refrigerated display cases, and other self-defrosting chiller systems in supermarkets, restaurants, school cafeterias, and more.

In late 2010, Sprouts Farmers Market set out to meet the EPA’s most stringent GreenChill standards with construction of its Thousand Oaks, Calif., store. Sprouts tapped Hill Phoenix to design a refrigeration system that not only would be environmentally friendly, but also energy efficient and cost effective to install and maintain.

Empirical testing has shown that the optimum time to defrost is when the evaporator loses about 10 percent efficiency. Traditional methods of defrost, based on time, cannot ascertain this loss of efficiency and will either waste time and energy in excessive defrosting, or never fully defrost the evaporator.

As new stores are built and older systems in existing stores replaced, an approach called secondary refrigeration is gaining wider acceptance and is steadily increasing in numbers.

Service technicians know that keeping compressors operating properly can present challenges, especially in supermarket refrigeration applications.

As today’s supermarkets continue to evolve, advances in software technology are helping to simplify critical refrigeration management issues.

Centralized refrigeration systems have been in use for years. Distributed systems, on the other hand, are one of the newer commercially adopted refrigeration technologies.