Michael Watkins, VP Marketing, Rytec High Performance Doors This article originally appeared in  Food Manufacturing’ s Jan/Feb print issue . Over the past year, the buzz in the food industry has been that sales of frozen food have experienced a slight drop at around 3 percent, with many consumers switching over to fresh food. Despite this changeover in the market basket, a lot of the country’s food is still produced and packaged under low-temperature conditions. So no matter if food is frozen or fresh, keeping the operation cold throughout the product handling chain is important for maintaining quality and avoiding failures that threaten a company’s market reputation. Yet protecting product also requires making sure the plant wastes as little of the cold air it generates as possible. For these conditions it’s necessary to consider high-speed doors, typically those featuring a roll-up style design and operating at speeds over 60 inches per second. Just about every processor is a high-volume operation and doors have to get out of the way so that product can move quickly from room to room to boost profitability and get food out to market. Thanks to this rapid operation and the design of these doors, there are five reasons why high-speed doors can meet the goals of getting product safely into the freezer case or onto the produce rack while using minimal energy to do it. 1. Minimizing Room Exposure When it comes to doors, the industry’s traditional mindset has focused on heat transfer between rooms – the thicker the door panel the better. But big and heavy means a ponderous door that takes longer to open, resulting in more air infiltration out of the cold room. The refrigeration system has to work harder to make up the difference to bring the cooler/freezer room below […]