For a caterer, the hard part is usually cooling. You cook ahead, and then the food has to come down fast. Under the FDA Food Code, which Virginia follows, cooked food has to go from 135 F to 70 F within two hours and then to 41 F within the next four. A walk-in can hold cold food all day, but it isn’t built to pull a full hotel pan of hot rice down by itself, and loading several hot pans at once raises the temperature of everything else in the box. Shallow pans and ice baths help a lot.
So if your walk-in reads 44 or 45 after a big prep day and recovers by morning, it may just be overloaded. If it’s warm on quiet days too, that’s a repair, and the walk-in cooler repair page is the place to start.
Food truck units
Refrigeration in a food truck has a rough life. It gets shaken over every pothole, and on a summer afternoon the inside of the truck gets very hot, with the condensers a couple of feet from the fryer. Vibration loosens electrical connections, and it can wear through small refrigerant tubing where it rubs against a bracket, which is one way truck units end up with leaks. Grease on the condenser does the same damage it does in a restaurant, and in a space that small the heat has nowhere to go.
Power is the other big one. A compressor draws a surge of current when it starts, and an undersized generator or a long, thin extension cord can drop the voltage enough that it struggles to start or trips on overload. If your unit runs fine on shore power at the commissary and acts up on the generator, tell us that when you call.
We work on the commercial reach-ins, undercounters and prep tables built into trucks and trailers, and on everything back at the commissary.
