Greetings,
We produce cooked, RTE soups. We are having issues meeting our cooling requirements, mainly the first two hours are an issue from 54C to 27C. We can't get a bigger compressor at this time. Our soup gets hot filled and packed in pouches. We place hot pouches on baking trays and load the trays on racks. The racks are then transported to a small freezer. Due to spacing issues, we cannot spread out the pouches too much on the trays. We prefer not to use ice wands or water baths for cooling. The freezer is not able to handle the heat generated from the product. We cannot reschedule production either. The full batch needs to be done at the same time.
Cooling is our CCP and we fail it more than we should. The best solution is a bigger freezer but that's not possible. From the failed lot, we send samples to the lab and our counts have been pretty good. I feel like I have looked at every possible solution but nothing fits our situation at this time.
The reason for this post is to find out if there is anything else which could be done to solve this problem. Maybe something that I am missing? I thought of trying trays with holes instead of solid flat trays but not sure if that will help much.
Thanks,
K