How to Size a Commercial Display Fridge for Your Floor Space

To size a commercial display fridge for your shop, measure three things before you look at any cabinet: the clear wall length available, the aisle depth in front of it, and the narrowest doorway the cabinet has to pass through on delivery day. Australian commercial display fridges and multidecks are built in fixed widths, so the practical question is not what size cabinet you want but which combination of standard widths fills your wall without blocking your aisle.
This guide is for supermarket, grocery, convenience store, butcher and deli owners planning a new fit-out or a refrigeration upgrade. It covers how to work out how many metres of refrigeration a shop needs, the standard sizes those metres come in, the clearances that don't appear on a spec sheet, and how to check that what you order can physically get into the building. Chill Pro Refrigeration is a Brisbane-based supplier of energy-efficient R290 commercial refrigeration, delivering across Queensland, New South Wales and Australia-wide, and this is the conversation we have with almost every customer before a quote goes out.
Start with the shop, not the cabinet
The most common sizing mistake is choosing a cabinet first and then trying to find a wall for it. Work the other way around.
Walk the shop with a tape measure and write down every clear run of wall or floor that could hold refrigeration. Measure between the fixed obstructions — a corner, a door frame, a structural column, a switchboard, the edge of the checkout — not the total wall length. That clear run, in millimetres, is the number that decides everything else.
Then allocate those runs by category, because category decides the type of cabinet as much as the size does. Fresh produce, dairy and drinks with high turnover suit open multidecks, where customers reach straight in. Packaged lines, bottled drinks and slower-moving stock suit glass-door display fridges, which cost noticeably less to run. Frozen lines need display freezers. Meat, smallgoods and deli lines served over a counter need a serve-over case. A section you expect to re-plan seasonally suits a dual temperature cabinet that can be switched between chiller and freezer duty.
Only then does cabinet width come into it. Our guide to choosing the right commercial display fridge works through the type decision in detail, and the comparison of open multidecks and glass-door fridges covers the trade-off between merchandising and running cost.
How many metres of refrigeration does a shop need?
There is no single formula, because it depends on your range, your turnover and how often you get deliveries. But there is a sensible way to arrive at a number rather than guessing.
Work from your range, not your floor area. Count the lines you carry in each refrigerated category and how many facings each needs to look full at the end of a trading day. A shelf that looks picked over stops selling well before it's empty, so a cabinet sized exactly to your average stock holding will always look worse than one sized to hold a comfortable surplus.
Work from your delivery cycle. A shop that gets fresh deliveries twice a week needs more display and back-of-house capacity than one that gets them daily. If you are sizing tightly to save floor space, you are committing to more frequent deliveries.
Sanity-check against the shape of the shop. A small independent grocer or convenience store typically ends up with somewhere in the range of six to twelve metres of refrigerated display in total, split across chilled, frozen and drinks. A full independent supermarket runs many times that, usually as several continuous runs rather than one. Treat these as orientation, not a specification — the right number for your shop is the one your range and delivery cycle produce.
Decide what belongs on the shop floor and what belongs out the back. Display refrigeration is expensive floor space and expensive to run; bulk holding is cheaper in a cool room. If you find yourself sizing display cabinets to hold a week of stock, the answer is usually a cool room behind the shop and a smaller, better-presented display run at the front. Our comparison of cool rooms and display refrigeration works through where that line sits.
The standard sizes to plan around
Commercial refrigeration comes in fixed widths, so a fit-out is an exercise in combining standard cabinets to fill a measured run. These are the Chill Pro sizes, and they're representative of what's available in Australia generally.
Upright glass-door display fridges and display freezers, in millimetres, width × depth × height:
1 door — 630 × 730 × 1980.
2 doors — 1260 × 730 × 1980.
3 doors — 1890 × 730 × 1980.
4 doors — 2520 × 730 × 1980.
Multidecks, open-front or with sliding or hinged doors, come in widths of 1000, 1315, 1520, 1940 and 2565 mm, at roughly 800 mm deep and 2000 mm tall.
Deli serve-over counters come in lengths of 1330, 1940, 2580 and 3830 mm, in a 1131 mm depth or a slimmer 951 mm depth, all 1190 mm tall.
Dual temperature island cabinets come in 1000, 1500, 2000 and 2500 mm lengths, 995 mm deep and 935 mm tall.
Two things follow from those numbers. First, a nominal "2.5 metre" cabinet is rarely exactly 2500 mm — a 4-door fridge is 2520 mm and a wide multideck is 2565 mm — so plan in millimetres and never round in your favour. Second, upright cabinets are close to two metres tall, which matters for sightlines across the shop and for anything mounted above them, and serve-over and island cabinets are well under 1200 mm, which is why they can sit in the middle of a floor without closing the space in.
The three measurements that decide a fit-out
Cabinet width is the easy one. These are the three that catch people out.
The clear wall run. Measure at floor level and again at cabinet height, because skirting boards, pipework, meter boxes and window sills often reduce the usable run higher up. Subtract a working tolerance of around 20 to 30 mm across a run of cabinets so they can be levelled and aligned rather than wedged.
The aisle in front. This is the measurement most often sacrificed and most often regretted. As a practical planning rule, a secondary aisle where one customer passes at a time wants at least about 1200 mm clear, and a main aisle where two people or a trolley need to pass wants closer to 1800 mm. Remember that open multidecks are used by customers standing in the aisle with the shelf pulled towards them, and that serve-over counters need queuing space in front as well as staff working space behind. Accessibility requirements for public areas are set by the National Construction Code and the relevant Australian Standards, and they apply to your building rather than to the cabinet — confirm the figures for your premises with your building certifier or shopfitter before you commit to a layout.
The delivery path. Measure the narrowest point between the truck and the final position: the loading door, the shop entrance, any internal doorway, the corridor width at a corner, and the ceiling height under any bulkhead. A 4-door upright is 730 mm deep and 1980 mm tall, so it needs a genuine 800 mm-plus clear opening and enough height to be tilted through it. A 2565 mm multideck needs both the opening and the room to turn. If the cabinet cannot make the turn, the fit-out stops on delivery day. Our delivery and installation guide covers how that side of it works.
The clearances a spec sheet doesn't always show
The external dimensions are not the space the cabinet occupies. Four more allowances belong on the plan.
Ventilation clearance. A self-contained cabinet rejects heat through its condenser and needs air to do it. Allow clear space at the back and sides — commonly at least 100 mm, but confirm the figure for the model you're buying — and never build a cabinet into a tight recess or push it hard against a wall. A cabinet that can't breathe runs hotter, uses more power and fails sooner, and blocked condensers are the single most common thing we find on service calls.
Ceiling and overhead space. A two-metre cabinet under a low bulkhead, an air conditioning outlet blowing warm air across an open multideck, or a downlight sitting directly above a case will all make the cabinet work harder. Check what is above the run, not just what is beside it.
Service and cleaning access. Someone has to reach the condenser, the controller and the back of the cabinet. On a long jointed run, plan how a single case would be pulled out if it needed work.
Power. Confirm how many outlets the run needs, whether each cabinet takes a standard 10-amp outlet or a dedicated circuit, and where those outlets sit relative to the cabinets. Refrigeration should be on properly rated circuits installed by a licensed electrician, never on extension leads or piggyback plugs. Get the electrical plan sorted before the cabinets arrive, not on the day.
Jointing cases into a continuous run
Where a wall is longer than a single cabinet, two or three cases jointed together into one continuous run almost always look better than a row of separate units with gaps between them. The display reads as one uninterrupted line of product, the shop looks bigger and more finished, and there are no awkward dead spaces collecting dust.
Serve-over counters joint straight or around a corner, which is what makes an L-shaped counter possible in a shop where a straight run would waste the corner. Southside Quality Meats in Dalby runs three 2.5 m multideck cases jointed into one continuous run for exactly this reason, and Moey's Butcher at Ripley in Queensland has an L-shaped serve-over counter jointed with a corner piece.
When you plan a jointed run, add up the case widths and then check the total against your measured wall run rather than assuming the nominal sizes add up neatly. Two 2565 mm multidecks are 5130 mm before you allow for levelling, so a five-metre wall will not take them.
It's also worth planning runs in matched heights and finishes. A row of cabinets of different vintages and heights is the fastest way to make a refurbished shop still look old, which is why staged replacement programmes work best when they replace complete runs rather than individual cases.
A worked example
Take a small independent grocer with a 6000 mm clear wall on one side of the shop, a 1600 mm aisle in front of it, and a 900 mm front entrance.
The 6000 mm run will not take three 1940 mm multidecks plus anything else, because that is 5820 mm before tolerances and leaves no room to level the run against the corner. A workable combination is a 2565 mm open multideck for produce and dairy, a 1940 mm open multideck for drinks, and a 1260 mm two-door glass-door fridge for packaged lines: 5765 mm of cabinet in a 6000 mm run, leaving 235 mm of tolerance and a small gap at the end for access.
Check the aisle. The multidecks are about 800 mm deep, so they don't intrude on the 1600 mm aisle at all — the aisle measurement is the clear space already. That's enough for a single-direction customer aisle, though a trolley passing a shopper will be tight.
Check the door. The widest cabinet is 2565 mm long but only about 800 mm deep, so it goes through a 900 mm entrance lengthways, provided there is room inside to turn it. The two-door fridge at 730 mm deep and 1980 mm tall also fits, but the height means it has to be walked in upright rather than tilted if the entrance has a low head.
Then check the power: three cabinets, three properly rated outlets, positioned behind the run.
That is the whole exercise. Numbers first, cabinets second.
The checklist to send with your enquiry
If you send us these, we can size a run properly rather than guessing, and quote something that will actually fit.
The clear length of each wall or floor run, in millimetres, measured between fixed obstructions.
The aisle depth in front of each run.
The narrowest doorway, corridor and turn on the path from the street to the final position, plus any low bulkheads.
Ceiling height over each run.
What each run has to merchandise, and roughly how many lines.
Your delivery frequency for fresh stock.
What you're running now, if anything, including cabinet ages and any that are giving you trouble.
A photo or two of the space, and a rough sketch if you have one. A sketch on the back of an envelope is genuinely useful.
Sizing and running cost pull in opposite directions, so it's worth reading them together — our supermarket running costs guide explains how to turn a cabinet's kWh per day figure into a real annual number before you settle the specification. And if the fit-out you want is larger than the cashflow you have this quarter, Chill Pro Trusted Finance Partners offer competitive rates in the market — ask us about it.
Frequently Asked Questions
How do I know what size display fridge I need?
Measure the clear wall run available in millimetres, decide what that run has to merchandise, then combine standard cabinet widths to fill it. Size to your range and delivery cycle rather than your floor area — a cabinet sized exactly to your average stock holding will look empty by the end of a trading day.
What size are commercial display fridges in Australia?
Upright glass-door display fridges and freezers are commonly built in 1, 2, 3 and 4-door widths — Chill Pro's are 630, 1260, 1890 and 2520 mm wide, 730 mm deep and 1980 mm tall. Multidecks come in 1000, 1315, 1520, 1940 and 2565 mm widths at about 800 mm deep and 2000 mm tall. Deli serve-over counters run from 1330 to 3830 mm long.
How much clearance does a commercial fridge need?
A self-contained cabinet needs clear air at the back and sides to reject heat through its condenser — commonly at least 100 mm, though you should confirm the figure for the model you buy. It also needs service access, and it should not sit under an air conditioning outlet or be built into a tight recess.
How much aisle space do I need in front of a display fridge?
As a practical planning rule, allow at least about 1200 mm clear in a secondary aisle and closer to 1800 mm in a main aisle where trolleys pass. Accessibility requirements for public areas of your building are set by the National Construction Code and Australian Standards — confirm those with your building certifier or shopfitter.
Will a commercial display fridge fit through my shop door?
Measure the narrowest opening, corridor and turn between the truck and the final position before you order. A 4-door upright is 730 mm deep and 1980 mm tall, so it needs a clear opening over 800 mm and enough height to walk it in. Send us the measurements with your enquiry and we'll check it before anything is dispatched.
Ready to Talk?
Planning a fit-out or replacing a run of cabinets? Chill Pro supplies energy-efficient R290 display fridges, open and doored multidecks, display freezers, deli serve-over counters, dual temperature cabinets and modular cool rooms to supermarkets, butchers and delis across Australia, dispatched from Brisbane and Sydney with Australia-wide freight and a 2-year parts and labour warranty.
Call us on 0456 680 882, email sales@chillpro.com.au, or use our Get a Quote form. Send through your measurements and a photo of the space and we'll come back with a cabinet run that fits, kWh per day figures for each unit, and a delivered price.
Chill Pro Refrigeration supplies premium, energy-efficient commercial refrigeration to supermarkets and butcher shops across Australia.
Need help choosing? Get a quote from Chill Pro Refrigeration — call 0456 680 882 or visit chillpro.com.au/get-a-quote.