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Comment by beerbajay | Hacker News Reader

> we learned that it’s illegal to use home kitchen for commercially sold food

aka "we didn't do any research at all"

> we were inspired by Uber and Airbnb to just ignore the regulators.

Those pesky food safety regulations. These guys were extremely negligent and should be glad they got out before anybody got sick.

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Yes. Keeping food in a fridge for 48 hours. What a crime.

Take a look at one of their hubs: https://imgur.com/a/PQJB09X. Maybe around 300+ meals stuffed in there? Back-of-the-enveloping the amount of time people are opening and closing those doors, I'm a little dubious they're staying at refrigerator temperature the whole time. I'm not surprised someone looked at this and thought, "That's an e. coli outbreak waiting to happen."

That refrigerator isn't even designed to hold food, it's supposed to be for beverages

Units with stainless doors and /or heavy duty glass frame construction have higher HP rating on the compressor with better insulation.

Are you making 5hat assessment simply because of the glass doors?

Because grocers use glass door freezers that are opened and closed all day long and it doesn't seem to be a problem.

No I am not making a 5hat assessment, I have worked in this industry and visited the production floor at the largest refrigeration factory in USA

Most reputable manufacturers have a logo at the topleft corner of the unit. Many offbrand Chinese manufacturers don't have a visible logo here.

Most front of the house refrigerators were designed to be (1) cheaper and therefore lesser quality components, (2) less insulation and therefore more packing. Because it was designed to hold drinks. You can tell this, namely in that it has a sliding door mechanism, which is standard across these units. Heavy duty glass kitchen refrigerators are always hinge based, namely because you need to load / unload quickly and have extra space accomodation

What you see in the grocery store is a whole different level. Whereas most standalone glassdoor units like this are self-contained refrigeration, the ones at the grocery store are generally remote-based compressors. They operate at a much higher efficiency, HP rating, and run at a higher voltage.

Could have been solved with temperature logging, then they would have a paper trail they could show to the regulators. Of course that paper trail may well show deficiencies but they could fix that. An employee would have to visit daily along with remote data logging.

I think their hub model is pretty sound provided you can satisfy the regulators.

If a supermarket freezer can keep things frozen while being opened and closed all day long, I can't see why this wouldn't be able to keep up.

It might not be rated high enough, but you can't tell from this picture.

The more full the refrigerator the longer it will maintain temperature.

That's only true assuming there's enough time for the contents to reach the target temperature.

I wouldn't cling to the narrative that it was those bureaucrats and their food safety regulations that killed Chowdy. Long listed three reasons they failed before he got to, "the Toronto health department did not approve of our distribution model."

There's a lot of food safety issues they ignored though

- 3rd party hubs means you get a wide range of manufacturers for refrigerated. Not all are rated equally. Sometimes the compressor goes bad, or insulation gaskets need to be replaced

- Food rotation. Because there is no staff at each location, there's a higher chance that you'll find meals 1+ weeks old. Its up to the consumer to see the date stamped

- If you rotate food often, unit will not be up to temperature (34-38*F) generally.

- If you don't have a designated employee at site to move food into refrigerator, it might spoil before it gets there. This deals with logistics

- Using 3rd party has a huge oversight in potentially tampering with food + legal implications.

- Inspections / legal is complicated

1: what if they were providing refrigerators?

2: This is daily delivery, so just have a driver remove all day-old food and bring new food

4: what if driver is responsible for that?

1,2,4 - These are all good points, I could not say either way. I would have to see more pictures of Chowdy's operations to know

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