Cold Room and Freezer Storage for Poultry in Ghana

What a cold store does to the sums on a broiler farm

Most broiler farmers we talk to sell live birds at the gate because that is the only plan they have. The birds are ready, the buyer is at the gate, and the flock has to go. A cold store gives you a second plan. You can dress a batch when the price is right, hold it chilled or frozen, and sell it on the day the buyer needs it rather than the day the birds are ready.

Look at the two starting prices on our list. A live broiler of about 2.5 kg starts at 110 cedis, and a dressed broiler starts at 120 cedis. Those numbers look close, and they are close. Once you count the dressing time, the bags, the ice and the power that runs the store, the gap can shrink fast. A cold room does not make a bird worth more. It lets you choose the day you sell it.

A store also does not make a bad bird good. We see farmers put birds into a freezer that were already stressed, dirty or left too long before the scalder, then wonder why the product smells in the second week. Quality is set before the bird goes in the box. The store only keeps it where you left it.

Before you buy any equipment, answer three questions and write the answers down: how many birds do you need to hold, for how many days, and what happens to the flock if the store fails on the second night. Everything else in this article follows from those three answers. If you are still planning the flock itself, our broiler day-old chicks page sets out the breeds we hatch, and our chick price list shows the starting cost of the birds. For where the dressed bird sits in the wider trade, see our value chain guide, and for the farm itself, about Halaal Farms explains where our chicks come from.

Freezer or cold room: choosing the right box for the job

There is no single right store. A small farm that dresses ten birds a week needs something very different from a farm holding two hundred birds through a festive week. Use this table to narrow the field before you ask a supplier for a quote.

A chest freezer is the commonest starting point, and it works well if you use it honestly. Keep it full, keep the lid closed, and put a thermometer inside. A chest freezer loses its cold fast when the lid is up, and its bottom basket is where old stock goes to be forgotten.

A walk-in cold room is worth the money once you hold stock for more than a few days every week. You can walk in, see the stock and count it without opening a box full of cold air each time. The cost is power and maintenance. We also cover the dressing side in our dressed chicken guide. Ask the installer for the compressor size, the expected daily power use, and what the unit does on a 33 degree Celsius afternoon. If they cannot answer the afternoon question, look for another installer.

The temperatures you have to hit, and how to prove them

Two numbers matter for poultry. Chilled birds should stay at 4 degrees Celsius or below. Frozen birds should stay at minus 18 degrees or colder. Those are the marks most food-safety guidance uses, and a buyer or inspector will expect you to know them without looking them up.

Knowing the number is not enough. You need to see it. Hang a thermometer where you can read it from the door, and put a second probe in the middle of a full load, because the air near the wall is never the same as the heart of the stack. Read both twice a day, morning and late afternoon, and write them in the store log.

• Morning and late-afternoon readings, written in the log with your initials
• A probe in a sealed bag of water or a dummy pack in the middle of the stack
• An alarm or phone alert if your store has a sensor that can send one
• A note in the log every time the door was left open for more than a minute

A log is not paperwork for its own sake. When a batch goes wrong, the log tells you whether the store failed, the birds were warm when they went in, or someone left the door open during a delivery. Without the log you guess, and most of the time you guess the wrong cause.

Sizing the store for your busiest week

Do the sum for the week you will be most stretched, not the average week. A farm that dresses forty birds on a quiet week and two hundred before Christmas will be short all year if it buys for the quiet week.

Start with the number of birds you will hold at the peak, then work out the space each bagged bird takes. Do not guess the space. Lay a row of bags on the floor, count how many fit on one shelf or one layer, and measure the height. Then add about 30 per cent for air gaps, because a stack with no gaps cools slowly and the middle stays warm for hours.

Here is a worked example. You dress 60 birds at the end of a fortnight, hold them frozen, and sell 20 a week. At the end of the first week you still hold 40. So the store has to take the largest number you will ever have in it, which is 60 bags plus whatever you keep for your own table. If your freezer only takes 40 bags, you will not sell those birds at the price you planned. You will sell them late, or in a hurry for less.

Plan for growth as well. If you intend to double the flock within a year, buy a store that can take the load you expect next year, or make sure the installer can add a second unit later without tearing out the first.

Harmattan dust, rainy-season damp and the heat around the store

A cold store in Kasoa works hard for most of the year. The machine that removes heat from the box has to throw that heat somewhere, and in the Central Region that somewhere is already hot. A condenser in full afternoon sun can run far harder than the same unit in a shaded corner.

Put the outdoor unit in shade, with at least an arm's length of clear air around it and nothing stacked against the fins. Harmattan is the time to check. Fine dust settles on the condenser coil within weeks, and a coil with a grey felt on it cannot throw heat away. Clean it with a soft brush and a low-pressure rinse once a month during dry spells, and switch the unit off at the wall before you go near the fan.

The rains bring the opposite problem. Humid air rushes in every time the door opens, and a freezer that is too cold for its surroundings grows frost inside the box and on the evaporator. Frost is not a disaster, but it means warm air is getting in somewhere. Check the door seal first, and never refreeze birds that have been left out in the damp to dry on a table.

One habit makes the biggest difference. Keep the store away from the feed room and the bird pens. Dust, ammonia and the smell of litter carry through a wall into a store that is left open, and birds in bags will pick it up. Our biosecurity guide covers the wider farm routine that keeps those smells and germs out of the rest of the buildings.

Dumsor: what to do before the lights go

Every farm in Ghana plans for the power to go. The question is whether your store holds long enough for you to act, and whether the plan is written down before the night you need it.

A closed, full freezer holds its cold for many hours. A half-empty one warms much faster, because there is less mass to keep cold. So if you have a light load, fill the spare space with sealed water bottles or bags of ice. They act as a thermal bank. Keep the door shut through the outage, because every opening lets in the warm air you are trying to keep out.

If you run a generator or an inverter, size it for the start-up surge, not only the running load. A compressor pulls several times its running current when it kicks in, and a generator that runs the lights but cannot start the compressor is no backup at all. Ask the installer for the start-up figure, then test the whole setup with the store running before you rely on it.

1. Write the outage plan on the wall beside the thermometer, with phone numbers for the electrician and the generator man.
2. Know the hold time of your store with the door shut and a full load. Test it once and write the result down.
3. Agree a cut-off point with your food-safety adviser. For example, a chilled store that has risen above your agreed limit for longer than your adviser allows sends its birds to the sale or the pot that same day.
4. After power returns, read the temperature before you reload, and log the outage with its start and end times.

Our FAQ answers the common questions we get about storage and transport. For anything specific to your premises, ask the people who will stand behind the store with you, your installer and your vet.

Loading the store without warming what is already in it

The worst thing you can do to a freezer is fill it with warm birds in one go. The cold air in the box is the only thing keeping the stock safe, and a warm load can take hours to pull down. Work in small lots, and let each lot reach its target before the next one goes in.

1. Chill the dressed birds to the target temperature first, in ice water or a chiller, before they go near the store. Pack them only when they are cold right through the middle.
2. Bag each bird, press out the air and seal it. Write the product, the weight, the packing date and the batch on a sticker or tape.
3. Load the lot onto a shelf that is already cold, with gaps between the bags so the air can move.
4. Close the door, wait, and check the temperature. Only then load the next lot.
5. Write the time and the temperature in the store log.

Keep raw poultry on the lowest shelves, below anything ready to eat, and never store dressed birds beside feed bags or open litter. Juice from a leaking bag is the cross-contamination you least want to find on the floor of a store, because it is the hardest to clean out of the corners.

Stock rotation and the labels a buyer can read

First in, first out is the rule every store manager repeats, and every small farm forgets. A freezer with no order is a freezer where birds from last March sit under this week's batch until someone finds them by the smell.

Put new stock at the back of the rack and bring the oldest forward. Keep a simple stock card on the door with the batch, the packing date, the number of bags and a column for what went out. Count the stock every Friday. The count takes a few minutes, and it tells you whether your sales match your dressing or whether birds are quietly ageing on the shelf.

The label is the buyer's first look at your quality. A good label shows the product name, the weight, the packing date, the batch number, the storage instruction and your phone number. Do not write "fresh" on a frozen bag, and do not print a use-by date you cannot back with a test. If a buyer rings with a complaint, the batch number on the bag lets you find the temperature log in two minutes.

The mistakes we see in cold stores, most often first

• Thawing birds on the kitchen table because the fridge is full. Thaw in the fridge, in a tray below the chilled birds, or in a sealed bag under cold running water.
• Refreezing a bird that has thawed out on the bench. The texture drops, and the food-safety risk goes up with every warm hour.
• Opening the door to "just check" three times in an hour. Each opening puts warm air into the box, and the fan has to work hard to get it back out.
• Filling the store to the ceiling so the air cannot move, then blaming the compressor when the middle of the stack stays warm.
• Reading the thermometer on the wall and never the probe in the stack. The wall is the first place to get cold and the last place to warm, so it flatters the store.
• Keeping no record of the defrost. A freezer that ices up quietly loses its cold a little more each week until one day it does not hold.

Most of these come from a store that many people use and nobody owns. Name one person who is responsible for the log, the Friday count and the defrost. A store with an owner rarely has the same problem twice.

A worked week: forty birds dressed, held and sold

Let us put numbers on a plausible week. Assume you dress forty broilers on Monday. Assume each live bird weighed about 2.5 kg at the gate, and that the buyer pays our starting prices, 110 cedis live or 120 cedis dressed. Sold live, the forty birds bring 4,400 cedis at the gate. Dressed and sold at 120 each, the gross is 4,800 cedis.

That 400 cedis gap is the whole case for the cold room, and it has to pay for everything else. Dressing takes labour, bags, ice, water, a scald and a clean space. The store runs every hour of the week whether you sell or not. So ask whether the gap covers your real cost to dress, chill, bag and hold. Fill in your own figures in the table below and see.

Our rule of thumb is that dressing pays only when you can sell most of the batch within a few days at the dressed price, and when the birds leave the store without the cold chain breaking. If you cannot sell them dressed, keep them alive and sell them live. A cold room full of birds nobody has bought is the most expensive way to hold a flock.

When you are ready to plan the next batch, see when to sell in our broiler selling guide, and check the chick timing against your sales date. Chicks ship the day they hatch, so the timing of the order matters more than most farmers expect. See our delivery page for how we send them out, and use the order form once the date is set.

A checklist before the first batch goes in

• A thermometer at the door, and a probe in the middle of a full load
• A store log with morning and late-afternoon readings for every day
• An outage plan on the wall, with phone numbers for the electrician and the generator
• A hold time tested with the door shut and a full load
• The condenser clean, with air around it and nothing stacked against it
• A stock card on the door, with first in, first out written at the top
• Labels showing product, weight, packing date and batch
• One named person responsible for the log, the Friday count and the defrost

Run through the list once a month. Most stores that fail do so on an item that somebody once meant to do.

Questions farmers ask