Storage: Somewhere Cold

The supermarkets are happy to deliver frozen goods to our door that we have ordered over the internet. Surely the same mechanisms that stop our ice cream from melting on its way to us could be used to send items (whether already frozen or to be frozen) into cold storage for us.

This section discusses:

• the Existing provision of this service: What, How, How Often, Costs, Providers and Trends
• the Proposed provision with localnet: What, How, How Often, Costs, Providers and Evolution
• how the existing and proposed services compare

Existing Provision

What

Here we are considering everything that we keep in our freezers. This includes:

• money-saving bulk purchases bought and eaten over weeks or months (a huge bag of peas; a box of thirty cod fillets...)
• items bought when available and eaten later out of season or otherwise not available (special offer on prawns this week, cheap raspberries at the height of the season...)
• home cooked dishes that are easier to make several of at once and freeze than make one at a time (buckets of chill, chicken curry, stews, soups...)
• homemade frozen dishes - ice cream, sorbet
• home-grown or locally picked fruit and vegetables that are over plentiful in season (blackberries, beans, raspberries)
• home-, friend- or locally-reared meat - unless you can eat half a pig within a week.

How

There isn't really anyone offering a “we'll freeze it and hold on to it until you want it back” service at present. Most of us have some form of freezer compartment in our refrigerator and/or a separate freezer. These now ubiquitous white goods have invaded our kitchens, utility rooms and garages since the 1970s.

Unfortunately, having your own freezer at home is the only way to do any of the things listed above - things that most of us take for granted. Home freezers are far from perfect though.

• They take up space which is becoming increasingly valuable as we move to smaller, higher density dwellings. For most pensioners, a chest freezer would just be out of the question.
• They are inflexible. I'd love a freezer that grew in the summer to accommodate the ice creams, lollies and bags of ice needed for barbecue parties and then gradually shrank towards the winter as we eat our way through the apple and blackberry pies put into it in the autumn. Instead, most of us end up with a much larger freezer than we need.
• Actually we don't... thanks to Parkinson's Law. Any spare space in a freezer is filled with layers of very old stuff at the bottom that no-one dares eat because they don't know how long the items have been there.
• They are not anything like as efficient as a large cold room. Again domestic versus industrial scale favours the whale over the mouse just on the volume to surface area ratio as the challenge here is to keep a certain volume of space twenty or more degrees Celsius below its surroundings - never mind the efficiencies of bigger machines.
• Freezers located inside a centrally heated house have to work much harder (and use more energy) than those situated in a cold garage. The temperature differential is very important in determining how much electricity they use.
• They are a pain to defrost. What do you do with the contents while defrosting them?
• They do defrost when you don't want them to. More than about twelve hours loss of power to your house and the freezer contents are a very expensive, festering mess.
• They're expensive. Electricity costs are rising. Few of us know how much our freezers are costing us but sooner or later we'll have to take notice.

Volume and Frequency

Most of use our freezers at least weekly and many daily. However, most of these uses are at the “top layer” of the chest freezer (or the front centre of your upright). Other items stay in there for years.

Financial Model

We all pay directly for:

• a new freezer every five to ten years
• the electricity our freezer uses to freeze the food we will eat in the future

We are also paying hidden costs of:

• a slightly larger house than we would otherwise need
• the electricity our freezer uses to freeze the dead space around the food, the accumulated ice that is too much hassle to get rid of by defrosting the freezer and the food we will never get round to eating
• additional air conditioning costs to remove the heat put into our house by the freezer (all the electrical energy it consumes has to end up as heat inside your house). Before those who don't have air conditioning jump to the conclusion that the freezer's heating effect is therefore good for them - it is at best neutral. If you heat your house using electricity it doesn't matter whether that went via an electric fire or your freezer. If you use gas or oil, you're probably doing so because it's cheaper than electricity - so you are losing money because a fraction of your heating is coming from the freezer's use of electricity.

Providers

I'm not aware of any company offering domestic scale freezing services but the supermarket vans that drop off your online shopping obviously manage to keep ice cream and other frozen goods cold between the supermarket's cold room and your door - so they should work just as well the other way round.

Trends

Higher density housing makes the space allocated to a freezer more expensive overall.

Increasing electricity costs and better awareness of carbon footprint mean the wasted energy used in all our freezers is becoming something we should start caring about.

As people start to grow more of their own food, so they will need more freezer capacity to cope with gluts.

With Localnet

What

Anything that will fit inside an  OmniBox can be collected (already frozen or not) and returned (still frozen) on demand.

How

This service is only available to those with localnet DeliveryPoints that include temperature controlled cabinets.  OmniBoxes are collected from these, transported in the refrigerated compartment of a delivery van and routed rapidly on arrival at the LocalHub to a cold room along with everyone else's frozen goods - and the frozen groceries awaiting delivery.

Volume and Frequency

Localnet encourages its users to shop more frequently for smaller amounts and there is less need to jump in the car and shop weekly or fortnightly, - so the purchase of frozen foods in bulk is likely to go down. If it's easier to get what you want, when you want it and in exactly the quantity you want, there is less incentive to buy lots and stash it in the freezer for later.

However, the already increasing popularity of growing your own food and cooking for yourself should get a huge shot in the arm from the “local Market” service that localnet brings. If people are able to sell on some of their produce, they will be encouraged to produce more but will also be more vulnerable to temporary gluts. Making a dozen apple and blackberry pies when the berries are freely available and you know you can sell them makes sense. Unless you've downsized and no longer have a chest freezer with ample space for them. These home producers will love the ability to send a box of pies, soups or vegetables to a cold room and get them back when the few they keep in their own freezer have been sold.

Financial Model

Pricing for this service should be based on what it really costs to freeze items at home. The box is tied up while full and there is a cost to keeping it cold and to moving it to and from the house.

The move (already happening but accelerated by localnet) towards more “just in time” food ordering should shift the balance of frozen goods from (albeit slowly) going off in individual households' frozen stashes to the higher turnaround cold rooms of the supermarkets. The longer an item has to be kept frozen, the more chance there is that it will never be eaten and every day, its carbon footprint is growing. We therefore want to encourage some uses of freezing food and discourage others.

A two-tier charging scheme is proposed:

• subsidised freezing of home grown or cooked produce - as this encourages more efficient cooking, local trade and reduces waste.
• more expensive (subsidising the above) continued cold storage of already frozen items - as transporting them back and forth and continuing to freeze them is less efficient than eating them when they were ordered.

Note that the former is actually cheaper to handle because it is initially not frozen and hence does not have to be kept frozen during the hour (or at most two) it takes to reach the cold room at the LocalHub.

As with many other services, eco-town project where one is trying to encourage residents into smaller properties should consider subsidising freezer services as they will make the small property more attractive. Without needing a separate freezer it will feel more spacious.

Providers

Every LocalHub is going to need a cold room where frozen groceries are stored until collected by a delivery van. There is therefore little additional overhead in making this larger so it can accommodate customers' frozen goods as well. Even if the required volume is several times what would otherwise be required, the incremental cost is not in proportion.

Provision of cold storage by specialist companies would only make sense if large concentrations of goods could be gathered. Unlike long term storage of “stuff”, the hope here is that anything being frozen will actually be used in the short to medium term. It is also important that anything in the shared cold room can be retrieved the same day - as it may be needed for dinner that night. This makes centralising over large areas less attractive.

Evolution

The trends highlighted earlier assume that we will still need our freezers as much as we do today. The impact of other localnet services is actually to reduce the need for a freezer in our own homes. We will not eliminate them but if we move towards more readily accessible daily rather than weekly shopping, many of us could probably get away with a slim upright freezer section as part of a combine fridge/freezer and forego the larger chest freezer that many of us have today.

This works well as an integral part of a localnet delivery hatch. Imagine a unit in your kitchen the width of two standard kitchen cupboards - which are the localnet delivery and collection points. The space above work-surface could easily house a fridge/freezer unit that is large enough for most families - as long as occasional overflow requirements can be met by a cold room at the LocalHub.

 

Comparison

The table below assesses the impact of localnet on this service on a scale of -5 to +5 (details here)

	Existing services	As part of localnet	Score
Scope	Home freezing can store bulk purchases and freeze fresh produce.	Can do the same but discourage the former while encouraging the latter. Being able to store larger volumes occasionally is valuable.	+1
Frequency	Home freezers are probably opened most days.	Want to reduce reliance on frozen bulk buys but increase use for home cooking and home-grown vegetables.	0
Security	Not applicable.	Not applicable.	0
Convenience	Day to day very convenient as long as actually have a freezer.	Slightly less convenient but does become accessible to all. Used in conjunction with a smaller home freezer, can work almost as well as large chest freezer in garage.	-1
Cost	Freezer depreciation, electricity.	End user cost should be lower for freezing home produce, higher for storing bulk buys.	0
Quality	Perfectly acceptable unless there is a sustained power cut.	A LocalHub would have backup power to its cold store.	+1
Carbon Footprint	Domestic freezer; often separate fridge and freezer; located in heated space.	Cold store much more efficient through larger volume, industrial compressors, better insulation, not in heated space.	+2
Time	For those who have a freezer, it only takes a few seconds to find things (normally).	A little more cumbersome to retrieve items.	-1
Resources Used	A lot of material is tied up in domestic freezers in every house.	Fewer, smaller freezers would be needed. Savings should outweigh the additional resources needed in the (larger and hence much more efficient) centralised cold stores.	+1
Reuse & Recycling	Those without freezers and those with insufficient room to store gluts end up with more compostable waste.	Less waste of home cooking and home-grown vegetables reduces compostable waste.	+1
Landfill Waste	Old refrigerator units a particular problem for councils.	Reduces need for freezers and hence ongoing disposal.	+2
Other Differentiators		Makes life better for those with no space for a freezer or too little to freeze to do so cost effectively.	+1