A Climate that Spans the Globe

Australia has to have one of the most variable climates in the world – deserts, rainforests, surf beaches and even snow-clad mountains. The diversity of the Australian climate is starkly reinforced below, showing how our single landmass encompasses the climates of tropical monsoonal India, Saharan Africa, South Africa’s veldt and the Baja California.

The challenge for product designers

The Australian climate presents a unique challenge for engineers and product designers, for any product they make for this market should work in all of these environments. For a company that manufacturers commercial refrigeration like SKOPE this creates a huge challenge.

After all, we must ensure our products meet legal food safety standards to keep food and dairy products below 5°C at all times, regardless of the climate. Whilst our beverage-selling customers demand their drinks are served at a consistently cold temperature of about 2°C; because this is what their customers expect.

On top of this, we need to build reliable, serviceable products that will keep working and keep performing, regardless of whether they are in an air-conditioned supermarket or an open-shopfront in Darwin.

SKOPE steps up to the challenge

Ultimately, the only way to ensure our products continue to perform in varied environmental conditions is a constant cyclical process of test, monitor, improve. It starts with a dedicated in-house product development team that makes up 12% of our workforce. The team makes use of sophisticated test rooms that enable us to adjust a whole range of variants such as temperature and humidity.

Our products must perform in working environments with heavy loads of food and drinks while the doors are constantly opening and closing. We recreate these conditions with blocks of synthetic gel (which are like expensive blocks of jelly) to replicate food, or fluid-filled cans whilst robots open and close doors repetitively. 

For a product to be released into the market it must not only work in the multi-environment cold-room, it must work in the real world. To do this we place fridges all over Australia. We wire them with smart, remote monitoring devices and watch how they perform.

All of this takes time, expertise and of course significant resources. However, in the end it provides certainty.

"Buying a quality engineered, fully tested product like SKOPE, is a bit like buying insurance; when you are not covered, and things go wrong – you wish you hadn’t compromised"