Safer, cleaner ice

Store Equipment & Design, April, 2000 by Howard Reill

Without reinventing the wheel, ice machine manufacturers are adding a host of safety- and efficiency-minded features.

Most of the ice used in seafood and produce departments and supermarket salad and juice bars is flaked rather than cubed because flaked ice molds more evenly, and hence more efficiently, to product. And while there have been no startling improvements to flaked ice machines, gains are coming in the form of steadier, sturdier, longer-lasting units that may save labor and help fight foodborne illness.

SANITATION FIRST

What the industry is looking for, says Danny Moore, assistant director of international training at Hoshizaki America Inc., Peachtree City, Ga., is cleaner, more sanitary ice machines. "An ice machine is a factory," he points out. "It takes a raw product, water, and turns it into a product that is consumed. So cleanliness and sanitation is a real key issue in the ice machine industry."

Hoshizaki's contribution to the flaker technology frontier is its Clean Cycle 12, a feature that automatically flushes and cleans the flaker unit every 12 hours.

As for cubers, Moore says, the same advancements in cleaning technology should show up there, too. "We have adjustments that let you clean it every one, two, five or 10 cycles. The same things would carry over to all ice machines."

In the years ahead, the "big push" among manufacturers will be on sanitation, predicts Bill Clark, product marketing manager at Manitowoc, Wis.-based cube machine manufacturer Manitowoc Ice. "The sanitarians are becoming more and more aware that ice is a food, and that therefore the liabilities are just too great not to address them better."

According to Brian Krausman, a salesman with Taylor Industries, a Des Moines, Iowa-based distributor of ice machines, a new Ice Flo unit manufactured by Los Angeles-based McCann's Engineering & Manufacturing serves as an "ice transport" system, using air pressure to move ice as far as 300 feet through tubes, from the maker to the dispenser. The unit saves labor and keeps ice sanitary by eliminating employees' scooping and transporting ice. At present, it works only on cubed ice, but a prototype that will handle flaked ice is currently in the works.

FEWER MOVING PARTS

At Scotsman Ice Systems, Vernon Hills, Ill., the latest innovation in cubers is the addition of a Copeland Glacier Scroll compressor, which increases the unit's life span by cutting 80 percent of its moving parts.

Proprietary research shows many larger customers want a lower cost of ownership, which over the life of a unit can be as much as three times or more of the purchase price of the machine, says Bob Craig, product manager for cubers at Scotsman. Scotsman's goal is to bring operating cost down, ultimately, by 25 percent.

Lengthening product life and increasing efficiency is a matter of regular maintenance, according to Garth Pearson, Scotsman's product manager for flakers. "Minerals build up in the machine during normal use, so they need to be cleaned. They may need to be adjusted. You have to make sure the seals all work," he says. "The people who don't do that get mediocre performance. For the people who do, the machines last forever."

LOOKING AHEAD

The future will see more electronic controls in ice makers, according to manufacturers. Hoshizaki already has an electronic timer board in its flaker unit. Soon, maintenance personnel will be able to use laptops to see if machines are running according to specs, though Moore admits the industry is "not there yet."

How soon technological changes come, according to Moore, is largely dependent on the service sector. "I don't know that the service industry is ready for a lot of high-tech, computer-driven stuff," he says.

Cubers, Pearson points out, have gotten "much, much more reliable over a couple of decades. The flakers need to do the same thing." Among the improvements to come should be a reduced need for cleaning, as well as better technology for manufacturing and sealing, which will extend the life of the product.