Blast Freezing Vs Chamber Freezing

With 30 years of experience within the industry, Magnavale has developed a reputation for being a temperature-controlled services partner who understands the pressures of production, including the importance of maintaining product quality. As a result, we have developed a portfolio of services, including Blast Freezing, which can pause shelf life and preserve product freshness and quality.

How Blast Freezing Works

The goal of an industrial freezer is to remove heat from the product as quickly and efficiently as possible. The rate at which heat can be removed from a product depends on the method utilised to remove the heat.

Blast freezing can freeze several tons of product, in all packaging and all presentations in as little as 16 hours. This super-fast process ensures that bacteria have minimal to no time to develop and keeps the product fresh.

This speedy freezing process of blast freezing provides benefits to both the consumer and the manufacturer, as it effectively stops rapid nutrient deterioration.

This process not only improves shelf life by reducing the period of time when food temperatures naturally accelerate to the rate at which harmful bacteria grow but also gives the producers and end users the ability to extend the shelf life of food products. This can significantly improve the availability of products, whilst reducing overall food waste.

Blast freezing also reduces the ice build-up within and upon products compared to the slower freezing methods.

The Most Efficient Method of Freezing

Blast freezing, also known as flash freezing, shock freezing or blast chilling, uses units that can house between 7 and 28 pallets of food product.

Blast freezing units super cool the air within the chamber to below -30°C and then use powerful fans to create a flow of cold air passing through the pallets of product and back again in a circular process. The efficient recirculation of air minimises the energy usage and allows it to be continuously and consistently cooled. The flow of such cold air over and through the product freezes it down rapidly to the desired output temperature, generally -18°C.

For many bakery products, the blast freezing process can achieve the desired output temperatures in a matter of a few hours, while high-density products like proteins and fats (like butter) take longer but still freeze down extremely rapidly.

As a case study product, the core temperature of pallets of paninis can go from a chilled 4.8°C to an intensely frozen -18.4°C within approximately 4 hours.

Chamber freezing is much slower in comparison, using the ambient temperature of the cold store and little or no airflow to slowly reduce temperatures over a matter of days or in some cases, weeks to reach deep-freeze temperatures.

If freeze-down time is a crucial factor in your cold chain, then choosing whether to blast freeze or chamber freeze your product could dramatically change your operations for the better.

If you’re interested in Blast Freezing, please enquire below.