New blast freezers reduce freezing time, provide more produce faster for community

Thanks to a Capacity Boost grant from Food Banks Canada, The Food Bank of Waterloo Region has bought and installed two new blast freezers for our Fresh Approaches Food Centre!

New blast freezers in Fresh Approaches Food Centre.

The grant, available to food banks across Canada, helps organizations like ours improve and expand organizational capacity to accept more food and support more people.

For The Food Bank, the blast freezers allow us to process more perishable product.

Before, our ability to freeze produce was limited by freezer time constraints and capacity. Freezing fresh fruits and vegetables could take up to 12 hours before they were frozen enough to be packaged for distribution. This process was slow, taking up valuable freezer space and time that could have been used to process more produce.

Now, with the blast freezers, fruits and vegetables only take 60 to 90 minutes to freeze! This greatly reduces the time needed to freeze produce, increases the total amount that we can freeze each day, and helps us provide more fruits and vegetables to people in our community.

The blast freezers are especially helpful when receiving large donations of berries from grocery stores.  Previously, we could only process 45 flats (about 1/3 skid) of berries in a day due to the lack of freezer space and the time needed to freeze the product. With the additional space and rapid freezing time that our blast freezers provide us, we can now process at least one whole skid of berries in a day! The blast freezers will also come in handy in the fall when farmers like to donate a surplus of fresh vegetables, like carrots and squash.

Fruit in blast freezer.

We couldn’t be more grateful to Food Banks Canada for helping us increase our inventory of frozen fruits and vegetables for the winter months when fresh produce isn’t as readily available, and for helping us grow our capacity to provide more food for people in need.