The Jet-Ready Precooler from Global Cooling Inc helps to quickly remove field heat from fresh fruit, vegetables, and floral products. These portable precooling tunnels are also being used to batch quick-thaw and temper (BQT) for products such as frozen guacamole and Philadelphia steak sandwich meat.
“In the past two years,” said Jim Still, Jet-Ready inventor and Global Cooling chief executive officer, “we’ve added more customers in California, Washington, Florida, Texas, Tennessee, the Dominican Republic, Chile, and a number of other states and countries. The concept of a Precooler as “personal equipment”—for logistic and tax-management purposes, as opposed to “real property”—permanently attached to your building structure, is really catching on. We are in the right place at the right time with the right product.”
Paul Esvelt, production manager at tree fruit company Stemilt Growers, said, “We cut our packed cherry cooling time to two hours from 12 hours—that is huge. Just because Global’s Jet Coolers are portable, don’t make the mistake of thinking they are somehow weak or don’t measure up. Our six Jets are moving about five times as much air per unit compared with the 32 fan units we used to use.”
During Wenatchee cherry season, which starts in a few weeks, Stemilt’s Jet Precoolers will be cooling nearly 800 tons of fruit every day.
“I can say, based on our experience with the Jet units, everything Stemilt is claiming is true,” said Rusty Lucca of Lucca Cold Storage in Vineland NJ. “We have had excellent results with grapes, blueberries, and avocados. We have also used them for drying onions.”
“We were just looking at our customer list,” said Still, “and the number of Jets in use surprised me. So we started adding up all the capacity of all the Jets, if they were all running at one time, like at this time of year here in North America. Most users only have one or two Jets, but several have as many as six. Then we added in our Rapid-Cool customers, the one-, two-, and three-tier ultra-high airflow precoolers. When we ran the totals at one ton per pallet, even I was surprised.”
The Jet and Rapid-Cool precoolers have a combined capacity of 8,132 tons of produce precooling capacity.
Jet Precooler customers have successfully used the units to cool every commodity attempted so far, with the lone exception being crates of corn. The list of can-do’s includes berries, apples, cherries, mangoes, avocados, flowers, jackfruit, papaya, bananas, herbs, lettuce, bell peppers, cucumbers, eggplant, squash, root stocks, jalapenos, and hops.
For more information, see www.PreCoolers.net.
