A wide variety of commercial and industrial businesses rely on cool rooms to keep perishable and/or volatile items properly refrigerated, but whether you use your cool room for storing flowers, fresh fruit or pharmaceuticals, simply piling your goods in a heap within your cool is hardly ideal. Robust racks and shelves are almost always required to keep your refrigerated goods properly organised and maintain proper airflow around the room.

Cool room racks and shelves can be made from a wide variety of materials, but stainless steel is considered one of the very best, and stainless steel fabricators do big business designing and crafting custom racks and shelving units for commercial cool rooms. When you consider the advantages of choosing stainless steel racks and shelves, this popularity is hardly surprising.

What are the advantages of choosing stainless steel racks and shelves for your cool room?

Durability

Stainless steel is an incredibly robust material and can withstand significant impacts without easily denting or buckling. This makes stainless steel racks and shelves particularly useful if you use forklifts and other lifting equipment to store and organise goods in your cool room, as even a small knock from a heavy forklift can deal significant damage to racks made of less robust materials.

Stainless steel racks also have another advantage on the durability front: their complete immunity to rust and rot. Since the refrigeration equipment used to keep cool room temperatures low also creates a significant amount of airborne humidity, racks and shelves made of conventional steel can quickly fall victim to corrosion, while timber shelves can absorb excessive amounts of this airborne humidity and become vulnerable to rot and fungal growth.

Load-bearing strength

Stainless steel is as strong as it is tough, and many heavy-duty stainless steel racks are capable of holding several tons of goods safely. This makes them an excellent choice for cool rooms used to store heavier items (such as beef carcasses or beer kegs), especially when compared to weaker aluminium racks and shelves, the only other rustproof option readily available to cool room operators. 

Low maintenance

With no rust or rot to worry about, no protective coatings to maintain and no significant damage to repair, stainless steel racks and shelves are very easy to maintain. Occasional inspections to check for wear around joints are usually all you need to do to keep your racks and shelves serviceable. 

Sanitation

The smooth, non-porous surfaces of stainless steel racks and shelves are very easy to keep clean and sanitary, which is ideal if your cool room is used to store food, pharmaceuticals or other items that must be stored in a sterile or near-sterile environment. Since stainless steel is non-reactive, you can use the harshest and most powerful cleaning chemicals to sterilise your racks and shelves without worrying about damaging the metal.

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