An operator who sets up a central kitchen spends the first year fixing the hot side: pot sizes, container counts, minutes on the road. The cold side arrives quietly behind it and usually becomes visible at the first inspection or the first complaint. A mistake in hot food is visible - the meal is cold and the customer says so. A mistake in the cold is invisible: the salad does not spoil, its shelf life simply gets shorter, and nobody measures that.
The day is fixed, the temperature wanders
A typical kitchen day is built like this:
- Production overnight or early morning, heat treatment.
- Cooling straight after the heat step - the rules do not allow this to wait.
- Portioning and filling the containers.
- Loading the round, usually into one vehicle.
- Eight to fifteen drops, a door opening at each one.
- Collecting the empties and heading back.
In that flow the temperature suffers most between steps three and five: the food has been chilled and packed, but there is no source of cold along the route. However well the vehicle cools, every opening of the door swaps the body air for outside air.
The regulation puts the container next to the vehicle
When Türkiye's Food Hygiene Regulation covers carriage, it names two things in one sentence: the vehicles and/or containers used to carry food must, where necessary, keep the food at appropriate temperatures and allow those temperatures to be monitored. The rule takes no interest in whether the cold comes from the body or from the box; it is interested in the result, and in the result being traceable.
The same regulation asks that where different foods travel together, they are adequately separated. On a kitchen round that means the hot box and the cold box are separate boxes. A compartmented body is not required; separate containers are enough.
Why a reefer struggles on this round
A refrigerated vehicle puts the cold into the body air. The Turkish Ministry of Education's own training module states the limit of that arrangement plainly: when the door opens, cold air flows out along the floor and warm humid outside air takes its place, and the evaporator fan, still running with the door open, keeps blowing chilled air outside. On an eight-drop kitchen round that is a loss repeated eight times a day.
The second limit is economic. In a reefer the cooling works for the whole body. If the cold part of the round is two boxes of salad and one tray of dessert, the unit still cools the entire volume and still burns the full fuel.
| Step on the round | Refrigerated body | Closed-container arrangement |
|---|---|---|
| Loading | Body pre-cooled, door standing open | Container and plates ready at the depot, loading takes minutes |
| Between drops | The unit runs continuously | The cold source sits inside the box, the vehicle only carries it |
| Door opening | Body air is exchanged with the street | Only the box being delivered is opened |
| Hot and cold on one trip | Needs a compartmented body | Two separate containers are enough |
| A day off the round | The vehicle stays a reefer | The box goes on the rack, the vehicle returns to dry work |
Where responsibility changes hands
The most disputed moment between kitchen and branch is the handover. Did the food leave the kitchen at the right temperature, did it warm up on the road, or did it wait on the branch dock? A closed container makes that argument easier to settle: the logger sits inside the box, the box is not opened until delivery, and the record tells the story of one box. A body record is an average of the whole round and shows nothing about what any single item went through.
In practice three records are kept together: the reading inside the container, the product temperature measured at goods-in, and the delivery time. Once all three land in the same file the argument ends.
How it is set up with Isotec
The arrangement runs on the GEBHARDT Isotec TBX. Nine sizes cover 410 to 1500 litres, payload is 500-700 kg, the regimes are 0…+2 °C and -21…-25 °C, and the containers are ATP and HACCP certified for food transport. As for how long the cold lasts, GEBHARDT gives up to 24 hours with eutectic plates or dry ice.
On the kitchen side three items complete the job: the freezing rack that takes plates down to the core, the intermediate shelf that separates goods inside the box, and the EPP thermobox for short hops. Size follows the route: how many trips a day, how many drops, how many boxes of salad. Send Aris Makina your route, your daily volume and the target temperature, and we will work out which of the nine sizes fits and how many you need.
What changes at the branch
The closed-container arrangement changes two things at the receiving end. First, the box goes straight into the branch cold room; the food is not decanted from crate to crate, and the warming that happens during decanting disappears. Second, the empty box travels back on the same vehicle and is washed and prepared for the next day. That is why the number of boxes is planned as one more than the number of rounds: one on the road, one in preparation.
