The Turkish Food Codex communiqué on ice cream draws the boundary of the job in a single sentence:
During carriage, storage and supply to the final consumer, the temperature of products covered by this communiqué shall be at most -18 °C. The short-term temperature rise tolerance shall be no more than 3 °C.
The critical part of that sentence is supply to the final consumer. The chain does not end at the depot or in the vehicle; it runs to the kiosk freezer, the hotel kitchen, the shop cabinet. The last point the distributor controls is the moment of handover - and that moment usually happens at the back of a vehicle, in the sun.
What happens inside the product
Ice cream answers a temperature error with loss of texture rather than spoilage. When the temperature rises and falls again, small ice crystals melt and refreeze as larger ones. The result is felt inside the pack: a sandy texture, a layer of ice under the lid, a drop in volume. The damage cannot be undone; taking the product back down to -18 °C does not bring the texture back.
So in ice cream distribution the average temperature says little on its own; the real question is how many times it went up. On a twenty-drop round a refrigerated body is opened twenty times; in the closed-container arrangement only the box being delivered is opened, and the rest are untouched.
The season problem: no fleet is built for three months
The second fact of this business is the calendar. Demand starts in June, peaks in August and falls away in September. A refrigerated vehicle, meanwhile, asks for its depreciation, insurance, servicing and inspection across twelve months. A vehicle bought for a three-month peak either stands still for nine months or becomes a dry-goods vehicle whose volume and payload have been cut by refrigeration equipment.
In the closed-container arrangement capacity grows differently:
- Before the season the number of boxes goes up, not the number of vehicles.
- Plate-freezing capacity is expanded - how many plates a day must turn over is calculated.
- In peak weeks the same vehicle runs a second round by swapping boxes.
- When the season ends the boxes go onto racks and the vehicle returns to dry work.
Regime and plate selection
Ice cream belongs to the deep-freeze regime. On the Isotec side that regime is prepared at -21…-25 °C; the recommended pre-cooling time is 12-20 hours and the plate has to be frozen through to its core. A plate frozen on the surface but unfinished inside runs out halfway through the round.
| Mistake | How it shows on the ground | The right way |
|---|---|---|
| Stacking plates instead of freezing them in slots | The plates in the middle never freeze through | One slot per plate on the freezing rack |
| Carrying frozen goods with a chilled-regime plate | Softening towards the end of the round | A plate matched to the regime |
| Loading the container without pre-cooling | A temperature jump in the first half hour | The container is pre-cooled together with its plates |
| Planning the round by address rather than by product | The furthest drop gets the most fragile goods | Frozen loads sit at the start of the round |
The last metre: from handover to the cabinet
In ice cream the chain most often breaks in the twenty metres between the vehicle and the cabinet. The body opens, the cases come down to the dock, somebody walks off for a signature, the case waits on concrete. Those twenty metres never make it into a record, but they leave a mark on the product.
A closed container shortens that step: the box rolls straight into the outlet, the goods stay inside it, and the transfer happens once, in front of the cabinet. At small outlets an EPP thermobox does the same job.
The arrangement built on Isotec
At the centre of the programme sits the GEBHARDT Isotec TBX. On the ice cream side the lower regime is what counts, meaning -21…-25 °C; in the chilled regime the same container runs 0…+2 °C. Sizes come in nine steps from 410 to 1500 litres, payload is 500-700 kg, and the containers are ATP and HACCP certified for food transport. With eutectic plates or dry ice, the holding time GEBHARDT gives reaches 24 hours.
Alongside it: the freezing rack, the rails that hold the plate under the container lid, and the thermobox for the last metre. Three numbers are enough to size a season properly: cases per day in the peak week, drops per round, and the longest gap between two drops. Send those three to Aris Makina and we will work out together how many boxes and how many plates will carry the season.
