Britain used to handle hot weather as a novelty. A few days above 28°C, ice cream sales spike, the news runs a clip of someone frying an egg on a paving slab, and by the following week we’re back to drizzle.
The last few summers have changed the script. The Met Office now classifies multi-day heat events above 30°C as a near-annual occurrence, and 2022 and 2024 both saw temperatures cross 40°C. For most of the country that’s still a curiosity. For anyone running a food business it’s a logistical problem that starts about a week before the heat arrives and doesn’t end until it’s gone.
Here’s what a switched-on operator actually does when the forecast turns red.
A week before
The first thing any decent kitchen does is check refrigeration health. A walk-in that’s been borderline for months will fail in a heatwave because the ambient temperature in the kitchen rises and the unit has to work harder than it ever has.
This means three jobs:
- Get a refrigeration engineer in to clean condenser coils, check refrigerant pressure, and confirm temperatures across all units. A choked condenser that runs fine in March will fall over in July.
- Check door seals on every fridge and freezer. Heat amplifies the cost of a leaky seal massively.
- Make sure every unit has at least 50mm of clearance behind it for airflow. Plenty of kitchens have shelves crammed up against the back of the fridge and don’t realise it’s strangling the unit.
Operators across London and the South East with any experience just call their commercial fridge repair firm in the second week of June and book everything in. Engineers like Be Cool Refrigeration get fully booked the moment a heat warning hits, and the operators who waited are at the back of the queue.
Three days before
Stock planning shifts. A heatwave changes what diners order. Salads and cold dishes go up. Heavy meat dishes go down. Beer and soft drink sales jump roughly 30 to 50 percent.
The smart move is to over-order on chilled drinks and salad ingredients and under-order on anything that won’t sell. A pub that goes into a heatwave with the same fridge full of ale and the same cellar of red wine is going to throw away product and miss out on cold lager sales at the same time.
The day before
Ice. Always ice. Ice machines run flat out in heat and nearly always can’t keep up. Buy in supplementary bags and have a freezer dedicated to drinks ice that nobody touches for stock.
Outside seating gets checked. Parasols, water jugs on tables, fans where allowed. Customer comfort is partly hospitality and partly basic safety in 35°C weather.
Staff hydration policies get checked. The HSE doesn’t set a maximum workplace temperature, but it does require employers to keep staff at a reasonable temperature, and a kitchen at 38°C in a 32°C heatwave is a real risk. Water stations, longer breaks, and salt are all standard for any operator who’s been through it before.
During
Run the kitchen colder for longer. Most prep moves to early morning, before the ambient temperature in the room climbs. Cooked food cooling becomes harder because the kitchen itself is warmer, so blast chillers go from convenient to essential.
Watch the fridges constantly. Temperature checks at every shift change rather than once a day. Any unit drifting more than one degree above setpoint gets flagged immediately rather than left until tomorrow.
The one to really watch is the walk-in freezer. People assume freezers cope easily with heat. They don’t. A freezer is moving heat from inside the cabinet to a kitchen that might be 38°C. The temperature gradient the compressor is fighting is enormous, and a freezer that runs at minus 18°C in winter might struggle to hold minus 14°C in a serious heatwave.
After
Once the heat breaks, run a check on every unit. Heat events shorten compressor life noticeably, and small problems that started during the wave will become bigger ones over the following months.
Get the engineer back in for a post-heatwave service if there were any temperature wobbles. It’s cheaper to catch a tired compressor in August than to replace it in November when the part is suddenly on a six-week lead time from Italy.
The bigger picture
UK heatwaves are no longer a one-in-a-decade event. The Climate Change Committee thinks 30°C-plus weeks will be a near-annual feature by 2035. Food businesses that build heatwave resilience into their normal operating rhythm now will save themselves a fortune over the next decade.
The ones that keep treating each summer as a surprise will keep paying for it, every July and August, in lost stock and broken equipment.