Last week I was doing some training in St. Paul. One of the things we did was go on a few store walks to see how the stores have set up their displays. On one of these trips, the trainer pointed out a disturbing characteristic in almost every store we went to.

In most grocery stores, there are freezers in the ailes called “coffin cases” typically located in front of the meat, cheeses, and milk sections. When you look down into them they are usually stocked with frozen meats, vegetables, fruits, and other items that need to be kept very cold. When you’re in the store next time, look at back side of one of these cases, inside the refrigerated part, right below the metal lip. You’ll see the words “Load Limit” which has two arrows pointing out from it horizontally. The stores are not supposed to load anything above this line or else the item will start to defrost. In most of the stores there was quite a bit above this line, frozen turkeys were the worst culprit, that was in various states of defrosting.