Daily Times

Have you ever gone food shopping on a lovely hot day only to be turned into an icicle walking past the supermarket’s open chiller cabinets? Suddenly that shorts and T-shirt combo doesn’t seem like such a smart idea as you dive in to grab your organic yoghurts. Well all that chilly discomfort could soon be history thanks to a gadget inspired by Formula 1 racing cars.

The device is basically a thin strip of aluminium and plastic shaped like a wing that is attached to the front of the cabinet shelves. “The aerofoil acts like the rear wing of an F1 car and guides the air to create an air curtain,” explains Craig Wilson, managing director of Williams Advanced Engineering (WAE). “It stops cold air spilling out into the stores.” The strip, a result of a collaboration between WAE, the offshoot of the Williams F1 team, and Aerofoil Energy, may look simple, but it could save supermarkets millions in refrigeration costs.

UK supermarket chain Sainsbury’s is so impressed it has decided to fit the aerofoils in as many of its 1,400 supermarkets and convenience stores as it can. “My wife used to moan at me incessantly about the cold when she went shopping at our local store,” says Paul Crewe, Sainsbury’s head of sustainability. “But after we fitted the aerofoils she thought we’d turned the heating up.” Of course, it’s not just about customer comfort. The supermarket chain’s annual electricity bill is “in the hundreds of millions of pounds”, he says, and refrigeration accounts for about half of that.

Fitting the aerofoils is reducing the chain’s refrigeration costs by up to 15%, says Mr Crewe – a potential annual saving of nearly £10m. “By looking outside of our industry, and borrowing technology from an industry that is renowned for its speed and efficiency, we are accelerating how we are reducing the impact on the environment, whilst making shopping in Sainsbury’s stores a more comfortable experience,” he says. But why do we have open chiller cabinets in the first place? Wouldn’t cabinets with doors be much more efficient?

“Consumers didn’t like having to open and close doors on fridges, so we needed a new solution,” argues Mr Crewe. But Myles McCarthy, director of implementation at the Carbon Trust, a sustainability consultancy that does a lot of work with supermarkets, suspects this has more to do with marketing. “They think we’ll buy less if there’s a barrier between the products and the consumer,” he says.

While he welcomes the aerofoil innovation, he says: “This is just a stop-gap. The best way to reduce energy consumption is to put sliding or pull-out doors on all their fridges – this could cut electricity usage by 30%-40%.”He thinks all the leading supermarkets should get together and all agree to put doors on their fridges by a certain date. This would “achieve their sustainability goals and save a lot of money,” he argues, “and then they wouldn’t lose competitive advantage.” But in the fiercely competitive, price-driven world of supermarket retailing, it’s hard to see such consensus breaking out any time soon.

Published in Daily Times, November 19^th 2017.