MaintScope · Meal prep kitchen

Meal prep & production kitchen refrigeration

If your blast chiller can't hit its cooling curve inside the time your food safety plan specifies, you're non-compliant on every batch and nothing looks broken. It's also a hard ceiling on how much you can produce in a day.

ABN 54 824 299 683RTA AU069294RHL L149949
Something not working right now?Don't read the rest of this — get someone out to look at it.

And if it's still running

Know what it's going to cost you — before it costs you

A licenced tech goes through every bit of air conditioning, ventilation and refrigeration you've got, and writes down what condition it's in, what needs doing and when, and what it's realistically going to cost you over the next year and the next five. Plain English, one PDF.

When this equipment stops, stock starts dying the same day.

Get a health check

Worked example · Meal prep kitchen · Somersby

What the report actually says

This is an example, not a real customer. It's built from the equipment a meal prep kitchen business typically runs, so you can see the shape of the report before you book one. Yours would be based on what's actually in your place.

What you’ve got

Equipment Age Condition Note
Blast chiller ~4 yrs Action Not hitting the cooling curve within time
Cool room (raw) ~6 yrs Serviceable
Cool room (finished) ~6 yrs Watch Cycling more than its pair
Freezer room ~6 yrs Serviceable
Prep area split systems x2 ~6 yrs Watch Heavy load, filters neglected

Needs attention now

  • The blast chiller isn’t hitting its curve. Your food safety plan almost certainly specifies cooling from 60°C to 21°C then to 5°C inside set times. If the machine can’t do it, you’re non-compliant on every batch, and no one has told you because nothing has visibly broken.
  • Finished-goods cool room cycling harder than the raw room. Same size, same load — that difference is a fault developing.

Your service year

When What
Per batch Cooling curve logged (you should already)
Quarterly Blast chiller performance verification
April Full service across all rooms
Sept Pre-summer service, splits priority

What it costs — next 12 months

Item Low High
Blast chiller service + verification $760 $1,400
Cool rooms x2, 2 visits each $1,680 $2,560
Freezer room, 2 visits $960 $1,560
Split systems x2 $360 $560
Total $3,760 $6,080

Coming in five years

  • Blast chiller compressor — $4,000–8,000
  • Cool room compressors — $2,800–5,500 each
  • Freezer compressor — $3,200–6,000

Quietly costing you money

A blast chiller that misses its curve is a recall waiting to happen. But before that, it’s slower throughput — batches occupying the machine longer than planned, which caps how much you can produce in a day. That’s a revenue ceiling created by a service issue.

What I’d do first

  1. Verify the blast chiller against its cooling curve, documented
  2. Find out why the finished-goods room is working harder than its twin
  3. Filters and service on both splits

How it works

$150 to come out. Everything else depends on what's there.

  1. I come out — $150.I go through the lot: what you've got, how old it is, what condition it's in. Takes an hour or two depending on how much is in the place.
  2. You get it in writing within 48 hours.One PDF. What's there, what needs doing and when, what it should cost you over the year, and what's coming further out.
  3. Anything that needs fixing, I quote on what I find.I can't price a service off a website — it depends on the unit, the access and what turns up when it's open. You'll get a real number, not a guess.
  4. If you'd rather not think about it again, I'll handle it.Scheduled servicing across the year, timed around your trade. No lock-in — plenty of people take the report and go it alone, and that's genuinely fine.
For a meal prep kitchen, expect somewhere around $3,760–6,080 a year in routine servicing once it's on a schedule — not counting breakdowns. Most people are either spending nothing and paying for it later, or spending more than that reacting to things. Knowing the number is the point.
Book a visit — $150

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