Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
Whenever I go out of town, I'd like to stop by and grab some frozen products that I can't get locally. However, this isn't a same day trip. On the shorter end of such trips, I'll leave on Sat., and won't return until Sunday night. On the longer end of trips, I'll leave on Friday morning, and won't come back until Monday night. That's 1 to almost 4 days of not having access to a freezer. If the hotel I stay in has a freezer, then probably not an issue. If it doesn't though, best I can do is keep the insulated, zippered cold bags with frozen cold packs inside the air conditioned room.
Will this be cold enough when I buy the frozen goods on the last day of my trip?
Four days? I doubt the frozen packs would hold that long. Perhaps dry ice or gel ice packs? Best would be probably Cooler Shock https://goo.gl/KVDd6J
How would you travel? Plane? Car? Backpack?
Not sure what kind of insulated zipper bag will you use, but get the size approx. matching the size of your frozen food. You need to pack your food as tightly as possible. (Use newspaper or Styrofoam bubbles to fill in the extra space - this will help insulate the space and make your cooler more efficient.)
Line your cooler with Reflectix. Place dry ice on top of food. Keep the ice in the paper it comes in or wrap it well with newspaper. You can wrap a blanket around the cooler to help with insulation or use a Styrofoam cooler instead.
If you use water based ice use block ice rather than crushed or cubed. Block ice will melt more slowly.
If this is frozen food that you want to bring back with you, buy it on the last day of the trip before you head back home, and use a cooler and dry ice (or regular ice if that's what you can get) to keep it cold. That will last a lot longer than freezer bags, depending on the kind of cooler that you get.
Driving. And the plan is to stop by the appropriate store(s) on the way home, so the last day, so to see if "there's enough cold" at that point.
Ice/cold packs are from Walmart (Rubbermaid and Coleman).. One is soft packaging, the other is like "bubblewrap" (with water cells that can be frozen) that can be wrapped along the walls of the insulated bag.
For driving you can get a regular Coleman cooler. It has the best insulation.
You will be driving four days after the purchase?
Still same rules apply. Pack the cooler tightly, fill the space. For cooling you can use water frozen in a bottle or two - it works like ice block, and doesn't leak.
Your food should be fine there.
it appears that the OP will make their purchase near the end of their trip ... "plan is to stop by the appropriate store(s) on the way home, so the last day"
So the need for keeping the food frozen is only a matter of hours, not "4 days".
As vendors at a Farmer's Market with frozen foods (poultry, lamb, and beef) ... we have no problems using high quality hard side coolers to keep our product frozen solid for most of a day (the time it takes to pack the coolers with product and ice packs, drive to the Market, 5 hours of Market set-up/tear down which includes the 4 hours of sales, and then the return trip home). If we have leftover product from the Market, it will still be frozen to return to our freezers. We start with product frozen to about 5 to 10 F, so it's pretty solid frozen and the "blue ice" packs we use are at that temp, too. We probably use more ice packs than are necessary for this food storage, but we want to give our customers the most solidly frozen product to take home ... because not all will have coolers w/ice packs for that trip and our product/reputation is at stake.
So the real issue for the OP is do they have enough thermal mass to ensure keeping the food frozen for their travel homeward. The size of the cooler is a big concern ... you want to pack it as full as possible with frozen food and cold packs or ice. Of course, denser foods such as meats have more thermal mass than frozen vegetables or ice cream or prepared foods, and that's a big consideration as to how long the food items will stay frozen.
If the OP doesn't have solidly frozen ice packs for the cooler on the way home, then buying dry ice at the point of food purchase could be a viable option. For shorter trips, they may be able to get by with a cooler from home solidly packed with "blue ice" packs which could still be quite frozen by the time they buy their food and head homeward. You'd remove the excess cold packs from the cooler to make room for the frozen food ... depending upon ambient conditions, the "blue ice" cold packs could readily stay frozen for several days on a trip in the cooler. Of course, much depends upon the starting temp ... you'd want to have cold packs in the single digits F, solidly frozen at the beginning of the trip.
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
