Cafes and coffee shops
Refrigeration for cafes and coffee shops
Commercial fridges for cafes and coffee shops: under-counter units, bottle coolers, cake displays and the cold storage a small back room can take.
What we usually supply
The cold side of a cafe counter
Under-counter fridges, bottle coolers and cake displays, sized to the counter space you actually have rather than a catalogue drawing.
Under-counter fridges
Built into the joinery under the counter, which is where most of the problems start: they need air, and a cabinet boxed in with nowhere for the warm air to go will work hard and fail early.
Bottle coolers and back-bar
Out front where customers see the drinks, or behind the bar where staff reach them without walking. The size is decided by your bottle range, not by the gap you happen to have.
Multidecks and grab-and-go
Glass-door cabinets for sandwiches, cold drinks and the lunch trade. Doors keep the running cost down, and in a warm shop they are the only cabinets that behave.
Cold storage behind the counter
One upright is usually enough for milk, cream and the morning delivery, and it stops the under-counter fridges being used as a store.
Cafe questions
What cafes ask us
The four questions we hear most from cafe owners, answered straight.
Because a cafe asks far more of them than a kitchen does. A domestic fridge is built for a door opened a few times an hour, in a room at 20 degrees. A cafe counter opens it every couple of minutes, in a warmer room, and the compressor never gets a rest. Commercial cabinets are built for that duty, and the difference usually shows within a year or two.
Yes, if it can breathe. An under-counter cabinet pulls air in and pushes warm air out, and boxing it in with no route out is the most common reason they fail early. We will give you the clearances before the joiner starts, which is much cheaper than fixing it afterwards.
Work back from your busiest hour rather than your average day. If you get through thirty litres before lunch, one under-counter unit will have you fetching from a back room mid-service, and a dedicated upright behind the counter solves it.
Yes. A single under-counter fridge or bottle cooler is a normal job for us, and it is how most of our cafe customers start.
Free advice
Tell us about your counter
Send a photo, or the measurements of the gap you have, and we will tell you what fits it and what it will cost. We work across the UK, mostly from Newcastle down to Surrey.