Updated 27th November, 2025
Wondering if a cold room is right for your business? Perhaps you are already so far beyond capacity that retail fridges and freezers just can’t keep up?
If so, MTCSS can help!
Offering all types of cold rooms, whether you need somewhere to store cold drinks, fruit and veg, or even flowers, we have a solution for you!
How many types of cold rooms are there?
Generally speaking, you’ll find five main cold room types:
- Walk-in fridges or chiller cold rooms
- Walk-in freezers or freezer cold rooms
- Dual-compartment cold rooms
- Ambient temperature-controlled rooms
- Modular cold rooms
This gives businesses across the country solutions for a variety of industries and applications for supply and install. This includes:
- Food and drink retail and manufacture
- Agriculture and horticulture
- Indoor farming
- Warehousing and distribution
- IT and data storage
- Automotive and aeronautical
- Pharmaceutical, medical, and healthcare
- Plus many more!
To make selecting a cold room for your business as easy as possible, the MTCSS team work closely with you to understand your business processes and needs, before offering cold storage solutions or bespoke designs that make the day-to-day of running your business easier.
So, now you know how many types of cold storage there are, which is right for you?
Chiller Cold Rooms
Chiller cold rooms, also known as walk-in fridges, maintain temperatures of between +1°C and +8°C, making them ideal for storing products that must be stored, prepared, or processed within positive chilled temperatures.
This commonly includes:
- Food and drink storage, such as supermarkets, restaurants, and takeaways.
- Farming and agriculture, where produce must be packed and processed.
- Pharmaceutical industries, laboratories, and healthcare facilities, where medicines are handled and stored.
To ensure they can work for any business, chilled cold rooms can be built to any size requirements, from small to large capacity, with refrigeration options to suit your space, ventilation, and temperature requirements.
Walk-In Freezers
A walk-in freezer, or freezer cold rooms, keeps produce at a freezing temperature for a prolonged period of time. This temperature is normally between 0°C and -40°C.
They are valuable as their very low temperatures prevent any present microbes from multiplying, stopping produce from spoiling or deteriorating.
For this reason, walk-in freezers are ideal for storing a variety of products and can be used to keep products frozen, or to freeze products which were previously chilled/ambient, depending on your requirements. This includes:
- Pharmaceuticals, automotive and aeronautical parts
- Prepared food products
- Cadavers in mortuaries
- And more
Plus, walk-in freezer rooms can be built with modular or bespoke sizes to suit your specification and application, so even if you are short on room or can’t make permanent changes, you can expand your storage space.
Differences between a walk-in fridge and freezer
When deciding on whether a walk-in fridge or freezer – or a combination of the two – you might wonder if there are any hidden differences between the two.
Aside from the temperatures within, the only things you need to be aware of are:
The greater health and safety concerns of walk-in freezers
Due to the lower temperatures, there is an increased risk to staff if they become trapped inside. To minimise this, be sure to fit and regularly maintain all cold room door handles and entrapment alarms, so users can always get out if the worst should happen.
Different panels
To preserve different temperature ranges within ambient, chiller, and freezer rooms, cold room panels of separate thicknesses are used.
80mm chill panels, as the name suggests, are designed to support ambient or walk-in chillers, while 100mm freeze panels are used for walk-in freezers.
Dual-compartment cold rooms
If you need a mix of chilled, ambient, and freezer spaces, a dual-compartment cold room is perfect for you!
With a variety of combinations, including:
- Chiller and freezer
- Chiller and chiller
- Freezer and freezer
- Chiller and ambient
- Freezer and ambient
Simply choose the two that work for you, and our team will use insulated panels to form two compartments that hold refrigerated air at the right temperature for your needs.
Plus, if you need three, four, or even more compartments, MTCSS can help design a storage solution to benefit your business and its processes.
Ambient Temperature Controlled Areas
Ambient rooms can be temperature-controlled without being uncomfortably cold, allowing for temperatures of between +10°C and +30°C or non-temperature-controlled.
Ambient areas can be used for storage of products, or they can be used for food preparation areas, while rooms without temperature control are commonly used to create:
- Food safe areas
- Office spaces within warehouses
- Pharmaceutical environments
- Areas where the processes/production rely on specific parameters
Modular Cold Rooms
Unlike standard cold rooms, modular cold rooms are constructed from prefabricated cam-lock units that come to site, allowing for much faster installation.
This cam-lock panel system means the cold room panels simply lock together and are fixed in place with a cam-lock key (similar to an Allen key), while ‘standard’ cold room panels have a male/female joint system which needs to be sealed.
Modular cold rooms are available as chiller or freezer cold rooms and come in specific size ranges and shapes, giving businesses a small to medium capacity cold room, that is square or rectangular, in just a few days.
Benefits of modular cold rooms include:
- Extra space without needing permanent features or changes to internal structures – this improved flexibility makes them great for renters.
- Suitability for smaller budgets – the increased affordability of modular cold rooms means that anyone who needs to expand their storage space can, without spending more than they can currently afford.
- Shorter build times – available in just a day or two, installation won’t affect day-to-day business operations and can be made faster with professional installation.
Bespoke Cold Rooms
Whether chiller or freezer units, or both, bespoke or custom cold rooms give almost limitless options.
They can be designed to any size requirements, from small to large capacity and can be built to exact sizes, unlike modular cold rooms. Likewise, bespoke cold rooms can also be built to most shapes, with angled walls, or can be used to transform an existing space into an insulated area.
MTCSS’s cold rooms are built with a food-safe panel, with the highest quality insulation, ensuring your cold room is efficient and easy to clean. We take every element of your cold room into consideration, from the cold room itself to the doors, floors, and refrigeration systems – all of which suit your business needs and operations to a T.
We can even install both a walk-in chiller AND freezer if you require – our dual compartment rooms can help you save on both space and money! Enquire with the team today for more information.
Find the temperature-controlled cold solution for any need
With so many types of cold rooms to choose from, it can be hard to know where to start.
That’s where we come in. With nearly 20 years in the industry, MTCSS offers specialist, temperature-controlled solutions for any industry, including retail, manufacturing, pharmaceuticals, and warehousing – so why not see how we can help you?
Call us on 01886 833 381, email us at sales@mtcss.co.uk or fill in an enquiry form and we’ll help you to finalise the design of a cold room space that works for you.
Image source: Pixabay