Mantı, içli köfte, vegetables, pastry: most home and workshop production reaches the buyer frozen. The visible face of the sale is the product; the invisible face is the -18 commitment that begins when the parcel closes and runs until the moment of delivery.
The rules side: -18 and its scope
The Turkish Food Codex requires quick-frozen food to stay at -18 °C or lower at every point, and allows a short rise of at most 3 °C during transport, distribution and in retail cabinets. That tolerance does not apply to storage, and ice cream follows its own requirement outside the communiqué. A producer moving into commercial sales sells knowing they operate inside this frame.
A freezer compartment is not enough; a blast is. A home fridge's freezer compartment freezes slowly; in slowly frozen food the growing ice crystals damage the texture and shed water on thawing. Blast freezing is the remedy for that difference, and how it is done has its own article; a producer without equipment can have the first batches frozen in the blast cabinet of a nearby ice-cream shop or butcher.
The box is sized from the journey time
The insulated box and fully frozen cold source are sized for the latest-delivery scenario: not the time the courier quotes, but the version of it that slips. A parcel handed over on Friday spends the weekend at a branch; dispatch days are chosen accordingly. What a delay does to the product, the article on courier days tracks day by day.
Your own test, before you sell
Before you start selling, send a parcel to your own address: at the end of the target time, is the product still frozen? Repeat the trial against the hottest month of the year. A product that thawed and refroze does not go back on sale; that is why the test parcel is insurance, not expense.
In frozen sales the yardstick is the product's state at handover.
When the scale grows
At regular volume the economics of single-use boxes invert, and a returnable insulated container with eutectic plates enters the calculation. In the deep-frozen regime the container's preparation is part of the job: GEBHARDT gives a pre-cooling target of -21 to -25 °C for the Isotec TBX deep-freeze zone. And the measurable form of the cold chain promise on an order page has an article of its own.
