Caterer Finds Refrigerated Freezer Trailers to Be a Cool Solution. From its beginnings as a butcher shop over a century ago, the name “Hess” has always stood for quality meat products in the Lancaster, Penn., area. But nowadays, Hess’s Barbecue Catering provides a full range of food items to cater the most elegant party, wedding or other social event.
Lloyd Hess is the third generation of the family to work in the business, and he explains how they got into catering. “Our shop is 108 years old, and we did custom butchering,” Hess says. A few years ago, Hess started renting out pig roasters. “Before you know it, people would say, ‘Could you bring coleslaw and potato salad? Could you come cater this event?’ That’s how we got started in the catering business,” Hess says.
Refrigerated Trailers for Catering
Soon the catering side of the business became more profitable than the butchering side. “We started out four years ago doing 10 weddings a year,” he says, and the business soon exploded in popularity. “We’re booked out for the total year,” Hess says. “We’re booking now for 2022. It’s amazing.”
Large Scale Catering
A recent job pointed up the difficulties that large-scale caterers often run into. “I got a call from a company that needed 1500 lunchboxes,” Hess says. “How do you handle, carry and deliver 1500 lunchboxes?” He found a custom-made trailer but there “really wasn’t much refrigeration and they didn’t want you to haul anything in it,” he says. “It didn’t work out.”
Then he discovered the refrigerated freezer trailers from Polar King Mobile. Constructed with a seamless fiberglass design, they’re available in three sizes: 6’ wide by 8’, 12’ or 16’ long. Each NSF-approved trailer features 54” reinforced doors, 4” walls and a pallet-duty floor. The heart of the trailer is a GOVI arktik 2000US refrigeration unit which provides a temperature range from 0 to 50 degrees F. And for the ultimate in convenience, the Polar King Mobile trailer operates on a standard 110 volt, 15 amp outlet.
Polar King Mobile Refrigerated Trailers
“What I like about the Polar King Mobile is that you can plug it into a 110,” Hess says. “Then we discovered that this is really nice for weddings. We can take this to a wedding event in the middle of a field and plug it into a 3000-watt generator.” For large events such as barbecue cook-offs, Hess would previously need several refrigerated trucks. “Now I can just load up product, plug it in and let it sit for three days,” he says. “And the inspector loves this small refrigerated trailer, so we can make everything a whole lot easier and safer. It’s efficient, quiet and you can plug it into any household unit.”
When asked to rate his Polar King Mobile refrigerated trailer on a 1-to-5 star scale, Hess said, “I’d give them six.” That’s high praise indeed.