"Climate Cooling understood our needs very quickly and that gave me a lot of confidence..."

Climate cooling helps specialist butcher maintain gourmet appeal

Background

Hall’s, situated in a busy parade of shops in Hazlemere, Bucks, has been a popular family butcher’s shop for over 25 years. However, with growing competition from supermarkets and nearby independent traders the business has diversified to become a specialist shop offering an extensive range of cheeses, cold meats, savoury foods, pies and pastries alongside all the cuts one would expect from a traditional family butcher.

The challenge for Hall’s was to maximise the display space within the store so that their extensive range of foods could be displayed to the greatest advantage to stimulate impulse purchases whilst maintaining effective temperature control.

Product preparation and storage at the rear of the premises would also have to be upgraded and reorganised to support Hall’s increasing range of products.

Climate Cooling responds to the challenge

Hall’s relationship with Climate Cooling had begun when proprietor, Graham Hall, added the company to its shortlist of refrigeration engineers able to provide servicing and emergency repairs. This ad hoc arrangement had been satisfactory in the past but with Hall’s diversification and increasing demand for higher performance from their display space, there was a need for a closer working relationship with a trusted supplier.

Graham Hall had been impressed with Climate Cooling’s reliability and confident, practical approach, so when decisions about refrigeration equipment needed to be made he involved them in the selection and planning decisions.

Reorganisation was a priority if maximum use of the available space was to be achieved. The aim was to utilise as many of the existing chillers and freezers as possible, adding new or refurbished units where there were clear advantages in either display space (for the same footprint) or lower maintenance and running costs. The results can be clearly seen in the photographs: all available wall space has been effectively employed as refrigerated display areas to create an exciting air of choice, variety and customer appeal.

Backroom operations were refurbished to increase the storage facilities and ensure a more ergonomically efficient working environment.

Air conditioning of the sales area was incorporated into the phased redesign programme because the benefits would dramatically enhance customer appeal and help to reduce the running costs of the chillers and freezers.

Graham Hall sums up his relationship with Climate Cooling

“Margins for food retailers today are very tight. Our success is due in no small part to how effectively we can tempt our customers to buy more premium products. Quality is everything. We’ve won countless awards for our products and presentation. Climate Cooling understood our needs very quickly and that gave me a lot of confidence in their ability to work with us on our terms.

 We have an annual maintenance contract with them. They’re very good at trouble-shooting so we only need to call them out for emergencies, maybe two or three times a year. If there’s an award going for rapid response and service, they’d win it every time.”