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A display case is the hardest-working salesperson in the room. Customers buy what looks freshest, and the case decides whether it does. The specification follows the buying moment, not the product.

Match the case to how people buy

Serve-over counters put staff between customer and product — right for delis, butchery, fish and anything sold by weight. Self-service cases let customers lift the product themselves, which lifts basket size and suits grab-and-go, drinks and packaged chilled lines. Impulse formats — countertop cases and island freezers — go where the queue forms, not where there is space on the wall. Most shops need two of the three.

Chilled or frozen, and how cold

Chilled display runs above zero and covers pastry, deli, drinks and fresh counters. Frozen display runs cold enough to hold ice cream hard — the upright display freezers here work around −24 to −16 °C, which is the band that keeps product properly frozen rather than merely cold. Ice cream and gelato have their own requirements again: see ice cream and gelato freezers.

Size by linear metre, buy by litre

Retail plans in metres of run; the equipment is sold in litres of usable volume. Both matter. The range here spans compact bottle coolers of a couple of hundred litres up to island and combination freezers past 900 litres and beyond two metres of run. Work out the metres your layout allows first, then check that the litres behind them match how often you restock.

Glass doors or open front

Open multi-decks sell harder — nothing between hand and product — and cost materially more to run. Glass-door merchandisers cut energy use substantially and hold temperature better in a warm shop, at the price of one extra action from the customer. The honest rule: open fronts for high-turnover impulse lines, glass-door merchandisers for everything that sits.

Where the heat goes

Integral units are self-contained: plug in, switch on, and the waste heat and compressor noise stay in the room. Remote units send the condensing side outside or to a plant room — quieter, cooler on the shop floor, and standard once you are running several cases. Above a handful of units, remote is usually the cheaper answer over the life of the shop. For a full-store plan, start at supermarket refrigeration.