Bakery Refrigeration
Retarder-provers, blast chillers, cold rooms and shop counters — installed, maintained and repaired for bakeries across London and Essex, by engineers who understand what the dough is meant to be doing.
A trade we have worked in for decades
Bakeries have been part of this business for most of its sixty years. It is a trade with its own rhythm and its own failure modes, and one where the refrigeration is not a convenience sitting in the background — it is production plant. When a retarder-prover does not come up to temperature overnight, there is nothing to sell at seven in the morning.
We cover the refrigeration, the air conditioning and ventilation that make a hot bakery workable, and the electrical work that goes with both — so a fault does not turn into three contractors blaming each other.
What we install and maintain
From a single cabinet in one shop to the plant behind a production bakery supplying a dozen of them.
Retarder-provers
The machine the whole night shift is built around: dough held down at around 3°C, then brought up to proving temperature and humidity on a timer so it is ready when the bakers walk in. Humidity control matters as much as temperature — dry air skins the dough.
Dough retarders and retarding cabinets
Straight retarding for shops and smaller production areas, holding dough back rather than proving it, so baking can be spread across the day instead of all happening at five in the morning.
Blast chillers and freezers
Pulling baked product down through the danger zone quickly, and freezing part-baked stock for finishing off in the shops. The difference between shelf life you can sell on and waste.
Ingredient and bulk cold rooms
Fats, fillings, fresh cream, yeast and finished stock. Cold rooms and freezer rooms, including door heaters, seals, defrost control and the alarms that tell you before the stock is lost, not after.
Chocolate and temperature-controlled rooms
Close control at around 18°C with the humidity kept down, so decoration and couverture behave and finished product does not bloom in storage.
Shop-front cabinets and counters
Cake and cream counters, sandwich and savoury units, bottle coolers and ice machines. The cabinets your customers actually see, which is why they are usually the ones you notice failing.
Why a bakery is not a general commercial site
Four things we plan around that a contractor without bakery experience will find out the hard way.
Flour dust is the enemy of a condenser
Airborne flour blinds condenser coils and evaporator fins faster than almost anything else we work around. Plant in a bakery runs hot and fails early unless the cleaning schedule is set for a bakery rather than for a general commercial site.
Humidity is half the job
A retarder-prover that holds temperature but not humidity will still ruin the batch. Fault-finding one means understanding what the dough is supposed to be doing, not just reading a gauge.
The work happens while you sleep
Production runs overnight and the shops open early. Planned visits get scheduled into the gap between the last bake and opening up, so maintenance costs you a quiet hour rather than a morning's trade.
Fresh cream leaves no margin
Cream, custard and cooked fillings are high-risk foods. Display cabinets have to hold temperature through a shop door opening every ninety seconds in July, and the records have to stand up when the EHO asks for them.
Bakers we have worked for
Grouts the Bakers
Seventy years of baking in south-east Essex, and still baking everything fresh each day at the Canvey Island bakery before it goes out to the shops — twelve of them now, from Benfleet and Canvey across to Rayleigh, Hadleigh, Westcliff and Leigh-on-Sea.
A single production bakery feeding a dozen shops is a refrigeration job with two halves: the plant that has to run overnight without fail, and the counters the public sees. We work across both.
Percy Ingle
A customer of ours for many years, and for most of east London simply where you bought your bread. Percy Ingle opened his first shop in Clarence Road, Hackney in 1954, and the family business grew to forty-eight of them across east London and Essex before closing shop by shop, the last going in March 2021.
Sausage rolls, Belgian buns, custard slices and their own spice blend in the hot cross buns. We are sorry they are gone, and glad to have looked after their plant while they were here.
Maintenance built round your week
Planned maintenance on bakery plant is mostly about keeping coils clean and catching the small things — a failing door heater, a drifting sensor, a defrost that is not clearing — before they become a night without production.
Visits are scheduled around your baking, temperature records are kept for your food safety paperwork, and statutory F-Gas leak checking is done on the same visit rather than as a separate call-out. Our engineers are F-Gas certified and the company is REFCOM Elite registered — the detail is on our F-Gas page.
For process cooling on larger production plant, see chilled water; for the wider commercial range, our refrigeration page.
When something stops overnight
A retarder-prover that fails at two in the morning is not a problem that keeps until Monday. Tell us what has happened and what it is holding, and we will tell you honestly whether it is a call-out now or a first-thing visit.
Where stock is at risk, the first job is usually protecting it — moving product, getting temporary cooling in, or getting a cold room holding again — and the repair second.
Talk to us about your bakery
One shop or a production bakery and a dozen of them — tell us what you have got and what it has to do.