What are the best commercial chest freezers for catering businesses?

You don’t think about your freezer until it lets you down. Then, it’s a crisis. Your stock spoils, your orders back up, your customers wait, and they’re running out of patience.  

One breakdown creates a chain reaction, hitting your margin and your reputation. But a good chest freezer is the quiet workhorse that every commercial kitchen depends on. 

This post breaks down the best commercial chest freezers for catering businesses, from space to temperature control to aftercare, so you can pick a model that fits your kitchen, protects your stock and keeps your team efficient. 

How much space do you really need? 

Chest freezers lose much less cold air when opened because cold air sinks and stays inside the unit, rather than spilling out like in upright freezers. This makes them far more efficient, especially in busy catering kitchens where the lid might be opened often. Their thick insulation and top-opening design help maintain a stable temperature, reducing strain on the compressor and keeping stock safer. 

And yet, there’s a drawback. Because they’re flatter than upright freezers, chest freezers take up more square footage per unit volume. This means every catering kitchen faces the same pressure: space versus storage. Choose wrong, and staff end up shifting stock mid-service or tripping over appliances and cables. The best commercial chest freezers for catering strike a balance of maximum capacity in a compact footprint. 

In a catering business, where prep space and back-of-house workflows are critical, one well-sized freezer often beats two smaller ones. You reduce plug use, defrost cycles and ambient heat, all of which help keep your kitchen safer and more efficient. 

You can explore our chest freezers online including our GM series which can be purchased directly via the online shop.  

What if you need a really, really cold freezer? 

What if your catering business needs a freezer that gets really, really cold?  

While most commercial catering freezers operate between -14°C and -24°C and have no need to get any colder, a few niche operations require much lower temperatures, reaching down to -45°C. 

This is especially true for sushi or sashimi caterers who need to deep-freeze raw fish, as well as seafood wholesalers with a catering arm who want to preserve ultra-fresh stock. Some high-end or molecular gastronomy caterers also use these ultra-low temperatures for rapid freezing techniques or creative plating. 

Fear not. Low temp chest freezers hold a potential solution yet again. TEFCOLD UK stocks a few options. These excellent freezers come with an extensive temperature range, far more than most market competitors. That makes them extremely useful in varied situations and for niche stock, like that mentioned above. 

Of course, the trade-off is that the energy costs are higher. It takes much more work from the compressor and refrigerant systems to maintain such low temperatures, and the bill might be three or four times that of a regular chest freezer.  

That said, if you’re in a market that requires a low-temperature chest freezer, check out the SE10-45, SE20-45, SE30-45, or the SE40-45. 

The EL Low Temperature (LT) range (EL11LT, EL21LT, EL31LT, EL41LT and EL51LT) can also reach temperatures as low as -45°C.