Lineage cut blast-freeze time by fixing airflow, not adding freezers

Blast freezing is a bottleneck in cold-chain logistics: pallets of fresh product must be frozen quickly before storage and transport. The obvious fix is more freezer capacity, but that adds capital and energy cost.

Lineage looked inside the freezer. Its team identified inefficiencies in both freezer design and pallet configuration, then worked with a customer on cases and high-flow spacers that reduced uneven freezing inside pallets.

The broader redesign made airflow the product. BusinessWire reported that the DOE recognized Lineage after it reduced freeze times by more than 50% and improved blast-cell energy efficiency by more than 20%.

The cleverness was physical and analytical at once: instead of treating the freezer as a cold room, Lineage treated it as a directed logistics system for air.

Make cold air go through the load

The intervention attacked the bottleneck inside the pallet, where cold air had been poorly distributed.

It improved throughput and energy performance without simply adding more freezer rooms.

Standardizing the design let one facility's learning become a network practice.

Before buying more capacity, model whether the existing capacity is actually touching the work.

The U.S. Department of Energy's Better Plants Program gave Lineage a 2020 Better Project Award for the blast-freezing work. Lineage said the standardized design and practice would be implemented across a network then spanning more than 300 locations in 12 countries.