Cold stores or cool stores
are refrigerating chambers, and they consist the necessary equipment for producers of agricultural and livestock products
who want to store their production for long periods of time.
Cold stores must have appropriate specifications, achieve the right conditions of temperature and humidity, and also be able to handle the gases resulting from the storage of products, for the benefit of their final quality. The reasons for preserving agricultural and livestock products in cold stores are the following:
• Equilibration of production with demand
• Seasonal harvests storage
• Consumption of goods throughout the year
• Storage of the excess quantity of a growing season
• Long period of time intervention between production and consumption
Cold stores are built using
certified polyurethane insulating panels. The innovation of the
particular panels used is related to their design, since the lateral vertical
surfaces on the interconnection (male-female) are not smooth, but have
trapezoidal recesses and protrusions, which manage to create thermal barriers.
The cool air of the cooling chamber is unable to follow a sloping course, and
in addition, it fails to penetrate the first thermal barrier. So, these panels
are the absolute solution for the construction of cold stores, since the
cooling losses they present are zero.
Cold stores are of varying sizes and they use air-cooling equipment to create a cold environment inside them, and depending on their size and location, the corresponding air-cooling equipment will be adapted. They can be made by specialized on-demand professionals but commercial models of mass production exist also in market. In general, the price of the new small cold store varies between $5,000-$10,000, but there is also a large variety of used items in market that cover all the requirements of potential buyers.