Air-Curtain Cases Dry Pads Out: Holding a Display Deck Dry All Day

An open multideck looks like the easiest place in the shop to keep product dry. Cold air is blowing, the deck is sloped, and any liquid should run away by itself. In practice the opposite happens: the air curtain pulls moisture off the pad faster than the product releases it, the pad crusts over, and by mid-afternoon the deck is damp in the middle and bone dry at the front edge. Understanding that cycle is what separates a display that holds up for ten hours from one that needs repadding at lunch.

What the air curtain does to an absorbent pad

A typical multideck moves air across the deck at 0.3 to 0.8 m/s with relative humidity around 60 to 75 percent, depending on the store. That is enough airflow to evaporate 200 to 400 ml per square metre per hour from a wet surface. A pad sitting in that stream loses its surface moisture, the fibres stiffen, and the wicking path from the product to the pad core effectively closes. The pad is not full; it is dry on top and blocked.

The result is a pad that looks unused at the front and sodden at the back, with a rim of dried protein where the two zones meet. Product sitting on that dry zone warms slightly, because evaporation is no longer carrying heat away, and the deck below it starts to film over. Once the film forms, the case smells by hour six.

Two things fix it. First, place the pad so at least 40 mm of it sits behind the product, in the slower air near the back panel, which gives liquid somewhere to travel. Second, do not expect an open case to thaw product. Thaw in the chiller overnight and use the case to hold already-thawed product; a pad then handles only seepage, not the full drip load.

Butcher counters: defrost cycles and the 3 pm puddle

Serve-over counters behave differently again. The glass and the night blind cut airflow, humidity rises, and the automatic defrost cycle every six hours dumps a pulse of meltwater into the deck well. That water has nothing to do with the product, but it lands on the pad and consumes capacity that was budgeted for drip.

On a five-bay counter holding trays of cut portions, the practical pattern is a pad change at opening, a check at the mid-day defrost, and a change at close. Three pads per bay per day is a realistic number for a busy counter; two is optimistic and four usually means something else is wrong, such as a blocked drain channel or a tray that has been overfilled above the load line.

Keep the pad inside the tray, not on the deck itself. A pad laid directly on a stainless deck slides when the tray is pushed back, bunches at the drain, and blocks it. The tray lip also gives the pad an edge to wick against, which a flat deck does not.

Load line, night blinds and the checks that matter

Product should sit below the load line marked on the case, and preferably no more than two pieces deep on a pad. Beyond that the upper layer drips onto the lower, the pad sees only the bottom layer, and the deck stays wet regardless of pad quality. On sloped decks, put the pad square to the tray rather than to the shelf, or it will creep downhill during the day.

Night blinds change the calculation. With the blind down, airflow drops, humidity climbs, and a pad that was dry at close will be damp by morning from condensation alone. Either pull the pads at close and let the deck dry, or accept a fresh pad at opening as standard. Whichever you choose, write it into the opening checklist so it happens on the days nobody senior is in.

Temperature discipline still matters more than absorbency. Case air at 0 to 4 °C with product surface at 5 to 7 °C after loading is normal for a multideck; product surface drifting above 8 °C for more than an hour is a loading or airflow problem, and no pad compensates for it.

Choosing a pad for a case is a matter of sheet size, a top sheet that resists drying, and a back film that will not ruck when the tray is slid. The pad formats listed by florpoly.com cover the tray sizes used on serve-over and multideck counters.