It happened to me this week.
One of our freezers gave up. Not dramatically — no alarm, no obvious sign. Just stopped doing its job on one of the hottest weeks on record. And in a 40-degree production kitchen, that is a problem that moves fast.
The first thing we did was assess the stock. Meat and high-risk items out first — that's non-negotiable. Everything else gets evaluated. Is it still frozen? Has it held temperature? If it hasn't, it goes. We're a bakery, so some of it went straight to the ovens and out to the shops the same day. Not everyone has that option. For most food businesses, a freezer failure in a heatwave is just a write-off.
We got lucky. We had space to move things. Not every business will.
Why is this happening?
Your refrigeration units are designed to operate in a commercial kitchen — a warm environment. But there is a difference between 25 degrees and 40 degrees. When a room is 10 to 15 degrees hotter than usual, your fridge and freezer have to work significantly harder to maintain the same internal temperature. The compressor runs more, the motor runs hotter, and the unit is under sustained stress it was not built to handle every day.
This is not a fault. It is physics. But it does mean the risk of failure is higher right now than at any other point this year.
What you should be doing differently this week
There is no legal maximum temperature for working in a kitchen in the UK. That decision sits with you as the operator. What I can tell you from experience is that slowing down in the heat is not optional — your body does it whether you plan for it or not. Mistakes go up. Concentration drops. The practical answer is regular breaks, proper hydration, and accepting that output will be lower. You cannot work around that.
On the refrigeration side — if you are not already logging extra temperature checks, start today. I instinctively look at every unit every time I walk past it. That is 20 years of habit. Your team does not have that instinct built in, which means it needs to be written into their process.
In Culinary Key, fridge and freezer logs sit alongside your food probe checks — so extra adhoc checks during a heatwave, delivery temperatures, and any additional unit monitoring all feed into the same audit trail. If an EHO visits next week, those records are already there.
Extra probe checks at delivery are important too. Cold chain integrity is compromised when ambient temperatures are this high. A delivery that looked fine at dispatch may not have held temperature by the time it reaches you.
If something goes down
The difference between a managed situation and a crisis usually comes down to one thing: whether your team knows what to do before it happens.
Who is the engineer? Is that number somewhere your staff can actually find it, or is it in someone's phone that might not be in the building? Culinary Key's Address Book is built for exactly this — key contacts per location, accessible to your whole team, so nobody is hunting through old emails when a freezer alarm goes off mid-service.
It is also worth having a procedure written down. What gets moved first, where does it go, what gets binned. If you have uploaded that to your staff training records, your team has access to it without needing to find you.
The compliance angle
Temperature logs showing extra checks during a red warning period are evidence that you took the heatwave seriously. That is not a small thing when an inspector is asking how you managed an extreme weather event.
It also gives you a record if you do have a failure — you can demonstrate your cold chain was being actively monitored, not ignored.
Conclusion
Your equipment is stressed, your team is slower, and the margin for error is smaller than usual. That is just the reality of running a food business in 36-degree heat. The businesses that come through it cleanly are the ones who tightened their processes before something went wrong, not after. I know because I was watching my own freezer this week.