Commercial Sliding Door Fridges

All of it. A swing door needs a clear arc in front of the cabinet about as wide as the door itself, so a 1350mm wide back bar fridge with three swing doors wants most of that 1350mm kept empty. A sliding door on the same cabinet needs nothing in front of it, because the panel travels sideways inside the width of the fridge.

Behind a bar that means two staff can keep moving past each other while one of them restocks, and in a shop aisle it means a customer can stand at the door without being pushed into the shelving opposite.

You only reach half the cabinet at a time. One panel slides behind the other, so half the opening is always covered, and a full width shelf has to be loaded in two passes. Anything tall or awkward, like a rack or a stacked crate, may not go through the opening at all.

The seal is the other one. A sliding panel closes against a frame and a brush strip instead of being pulled tight onto a gasket all the way round the way a swing door is, so it is less forgiving of a door left half shut. Staff need to be in the habit of sliding it fully home.

Wipe the bottom track out at the end of every day. It collects bottle caps, crumbs, sugar and whatever gets spilled down the front of the cabinet, and once that packs into the channel the doors get heavier and heavier until they stop moving.

Warm water, detergent and a cloth is all it takes if you do it daily. Where a door has already started to drag, clear the channel properly and look at the rollers and the glide strip before you put more weight on the handle, because forcing a jammed panel is what breaks them.

A swing door has the edge on sealing. Its gasket pulls flat onto the frame all the way round as the door closes, and on most cabinets a closer finishes the last few centimetres by itself. A sliding panel has to be pushed fully into its stop by hand, with nothing to finish the job for you.

In practice it matters less than it sounds, as long as staff shut the doors properly and the tracks are clean. Where a cabinet is opened constantly and half shut in a hurry, a swing door is the safer buy, and REO offers commercial glass door fridges and commercial solid door fridges in swing door uprights.

Measure the height under the bar first. The Bromic BB0330GDS-NR-1 is 870mm high, 1350mm wide and 520mm deep, and the two door BB0200GDS-NR-1 holds 190L in a smaller cabinet, so both are built to go under a standard bar counter.

Check the depth of the bar run as well as the height, and leave the ventilation clearance the manufacturer asks for. A back bar fridge boxed in tight against a solid plinth on every side cannot shed heat through its condenser, and it will run far longer than it needs to.

It is the low, open-fronted cabinet that runs down the middle of a supermarket or convenience store aisle, angled so a shopper sees the product from above as well as from the front. Sliding doors are fitted across the front so the cabinet holds temperature without losing that display.

REO offers the Bromic SVM1580SD-NR at 1580mm long with two sliding doors and the SVM2500SD-NR at 2500mm with four. They are long units, so measure the aisle and the delivery route before you order.

Work from how much you sell between restocks and from the width you have. Two doors at 190L suits a small bar or a coffee shop. Three doors at 307L covers a normal pub back bar. A 945L two door upright is a bottle shop or a takeaway drinks cabinet, and Bromic uprights go to 1980L above that.

More doors on a slider does not open more of the cabinet at once, which is worth remembering on a long unit. Four sliding panels on a 2500mm cabinet still leave half of it covered at any moment, so size the fridge on the litres you need and the width you have.

Bromic asks for 15cm at the rear and 15cm at each side on the GM0980LS-NR upright, and every cabinet carries a figure like it on its product page. That gap is what lets the condenser shed heat, and closing it up is the most common reason a fridge that was fine on day one starts running constantly.

Castors help. The Bromic upright and under bench cabinets come on castor wheels, so the fridge can be rolled out to clean the condenser and the floor behind it without three people lifting it.

The Bromic sliding door cabinets REO offers hold +1°C to +10°C, which is a drinks and packaged product band. Australian food safety rules want cold food at or below 5°C, so if the cabinet is holding food as well as drinks, set it toward the bottom of that band and check it with a probe thermometer.

The back bar sliders are also tropical rated, which means they are built to hold that band in ambient conditions up to 38°C. REO offers tropical fridges as a group of their own if the room the cabinet is going into runs hot.

Slide every door end to end before you sign anything. A panel knocked in transit will bind or sit proud of the frame, and that is far easier to see on the day than after the fridge is pushed into a bar run.

Glass, tracks and the corners of the cabinet are the parts most often marked on a truck. Check the unit for transit damage as soon as it arrives and tell us within 24 hours. Not two days, not two weeks. REO offers a 24-hour replacement guarantee on transit damage, and it only applies if you tell us inside that window.