CRS offer a variety of blast freezers and cold stores in a range of capacities suitable for storing fruit and vegetables. We understand the importance of ensuring freshness and maintain the quality of produce.
Appropriate cold storage is vital to optimise business productivity and efficiency. Therefore, we work with your industry, to meet your specific and unique requirements and needs. The high-quality options offered by CRS will ensure to provide your company with the best solution to keep your products fresh all year long.
The options of cold room stores offered by CRS include:
Refrigerated Cold Stores
Portable Blast Freezers
CRS Cold stores allow additional storage and can be beneficial to freeing up space within your premises.
Maximising Quality and Freshness
When running a business which uses locally produced Fruit and vegetables, ensuring that they are kept fresh and shelf life is maximized is important.
Some businesses may also aim to import products from abroad and these will require safe storing to reach customers in peak condition. This article provides some ways in which perishable items can be packed and stored.
As some fruits and vegetables can be temperature sensitive, storing them correctly can reduce waste, cost and help increase shelf life of fruit and vegetables.
Correct temperature
There is unlikely to be one temperature that will allow optimum storage for all fruits and vegetables. As All fruit and vegetables will vary in their temperature to be stored. However, CRS cold store’s allow the flexibility store produce at -40°C to +10°C. This allows a varied temperature to suit chilling and freezing options.
This table is a recommendation for storing some of the most common/popular types of fruit and veg.
|
Produce Type |
Optimum Temperature °C |
Optimum humidity % |
Storage life |
|
Apples |
1-4 |
90-95 |
Up to 12 months |
|
Bananas |
13-16 |
80-95 |
Up to 3 weeks |
|
Berries (incl. Strawberries) |
0 |
90-95 |
Blackberries and raspberries up to 3 days, strawberries and cherries up to 7 days |
|
Grapes |
0 |
85 |
Up to 8 weeks |
|
Nectarines, plums and peaches |
0 |
90-95 |
Up to 5 weeks |
|
Pears |
-1-0 |
90–95 |
Up to 7 months |
|
Broccoli and cauliflower |
0 |
95-100 |
Up to 4 weeks |
|
Carrots, mature and immature |
0 |
98-100 |
Mature, up to 9 months and immature up to 6 weeks |
|
Onion, white and red |
0 |
65–70 |
Up to 8 months |
|
Lettuce |
0 |
98–100 |
Up to 3 weeks |
General storage
Some products may be required to be stored in crates, plastic wrapping or boxes. For example, ensuring that bananas are kept stored in crates and separate from other fruit is also important.
Due to the nature of bananas ripening very quickly, this will cause fruit that are stored around it to also ripen.
Storing fruits and vegetables together can also be bad due to the level of ethylene some fruits give off. This can impact other products that are stored around it and cause them to spoil faster.
Packing
Ensuring that vegetables can be stored for a long period is also important for the catering, retail and food industry. Increasing sales required high quality and fresh produce.
Vegetables and fruit have different packing that they may require keeping them stored to optimum level. Therefore, it is important to store products correctly to prevent large quantities of waste.
Vegetables will be required to stored separately in crates and loosely. The closer vegetables are, the quicker they will rot. Having the correct packaging can ensure that products are stored to the best they can be. This will be useful increasing, productivity which as a result can help and assist in sales.
CRS Products & Services
CRS offers a diverse and bespoke range of refrigeration products and services to the naturally seasonal fruit & vegetable industry.
New and refurbished equipment is available to rent, lease or buy with unbeatable pricing for hire periods of six months and up.
Call 0800 085 2298 for a free, no obligation quote.
