Most kitchens don’t get to pick a single refrigeration style and be done with it. A mixed hospitality line — where a café trades through breakfast and lunch, a pub runs a bistro alongside a public bar, or a bakery supplies both a retail counter and wholesale orders — asks different things of cold storage at different points in the day. The real decision isn’t upright or under-bench. It’s which cabinet does which job.
What Upright and Under-Bench Fridges Actually Do During Service
An upright fridge is a storage-first cabinet. It stands full height, typically in a single, double or triple door configuration, and its job is volume: trays, crates, containers, delivery-day stock and the reserves that keep service running when the next order hasn’t landed. In a mixed line the upright is usually the workhorse of the back of house, and the range reflects how varied that job is — from a Coldline single door upright master cabinet fridge at 700Lt through to a Thermaster 1500L full-width three solid door upright, or an Anvil 600L steel door upright storage fridge. Pastry cabinets go further again, with tray counts such as 25 or 50 EN6040 trays on Coldline models, which matters if you’re running a bakery or a dessert-heavy kitchen.
An under-bench fridge solves a different problem. It sits beneath a work surface, so the bench above becomes usable prep space and the cold storage sits exactly where hands are already working. Some units are door cabinets; others are drawer configurations that let a cook pull a gastronorm without stepping back from the pass. It isn’t really about how much you can store — it’s about how little time you spend walking to get it.
The trade-off is straightforward. Uprights generally give you more usable volume for the floor area they occupy because they build upwards, but they take a full-height footprint and dominate a wall. Under-bench units protect the workflow and the bench run, but their internal volume is modest, they sit low, and each one is effectively a cabinet you’ve bought twice — once as refrigeration, once as the bench above it.
The category itself is broad. The commercial fridge collection currently lists 229 products — a figure that can change — largely split between bar fridges and upright storage fridges, with under-bench models sitting in a separate range. That breadth is exactly why the shelf-and-drawer plan should be drawn before the shopping list.
Mapping a Mixed Line: Where Each Cabinet Earns Its Keep
Start with the walking. In a café, under-bench units belong in the front prep zone where milk, garnishes, sandwich fillings and small-batch mise en place are handled across the whole service — every extra step back to a distant fridge shows up in queue times. Uprights belong behind, holding delivery-day stock, bulk backups and anything that only comes out a few times a day. A bakery can run the same logic with a different map: a pastry upright holding trays at its set conditions, and under-bench drawers at the finishing bench for creams, fillings and glazes that are touched every few minutes.
Bars, pubs and hotels complicate the picture
That’s where mixed lines really show their character. The bar needs glass door and solid door bar fridges within reach of the well — the catalogue’s back bar models, such as Anvil two, three and four door glass back bar fridges, the Polar G-Series counter back bar cooler at 330Ltr or the AG three sliding door bar fridge, are aimed squarely at that job. The kitchen attached to it needs under-bench refrigeration along the cook line and uprights in the store room or cool room ante-area. A hotel running breakfast, lunch and dinner plus a public bar might need all three patterns in one building, on one delivery schedule, with one set of staff rotating through.
Because the decisions interlock, it pays to compare upright and under-bench commercial refrigeration as a single plan rather than two separate purchases. Choose the bench run first, mark where the prep, plating and pass zones sit, then see how much volume is left over for bulk storage and where that storage can physically stand. Getting the sequence the other way around — buying a large upright first and squeezing the line around it — is how kitchens end up with a beautifully stocked store room and a congested pass.
It’s also worth being honest about service rhythm. A small under-bench unit near the pass can outperform a much larger cabinet against the far wall during a rush, simply because nobody has to leave the line. But run that logic across a whole kitchen and you end up with a dozen tiny fridges, none of which will hold a delivery. The balance tends to sit in the middle: under-bench near hands, uprights near stock.
Practical Checks Before You Commit to Either Format
Dimensions and door layout cause more headaches than most buyers expect. An under-bench cabinet has to clear the bench height, kickboard and any drawer bank above it, and the door or drawer needs room to open with someone standing at the bench. Uprights need door swing clearance in a corridor or store room, plus enough room to slide a tray or wheel a trolley in. The sensible starting point is to compare cabinet dimensions, door layout and the selected model’s operating conditions before anything else. Do that on paper, with a tape measure, in the actual room.
Airflow, power and position on the plan
Installation requirements are part of the same conversation. Refrigeration has to breathe, and an under-bench unit packed into a tight joinery run with no airflow will struggle no matter how good the cabinet is. Uprights positioned close to a cook line cope with heat and grease far better when they’re given some separation. Check the power available at each position, the floor level and drainage before the joinery is locked in — relocating a cabinet after the bench is built is a much more expensive exercise than moving it on the plan.
Then there’s the stock question. If your uprights can no longer hold delivery-day stock, more uprights aren’t always the answer. Cold rooms, cool rooms and freezer rooms can be designed and manufactured to suit the site, which is often the more sensible move once bulk storage becomes the bottleneck and the kitchen needs its uprights for day-to-day work rather than pallet-sized deliveries.
Finance, showroom and after-sales
Finally, support. Atlantic Equipment is an authorised dealer for SilverChef Rent-Try-Buy, structured around low weekly payments with the option to upgrade or purchase after 12 months — useful for operators fitting out a first venue or trialling a new format before committing. The Granville showroom, open Monday to Friday 9:00am–5:00pm and Saturday 10:00am–2:00pm, is where the measuring gets easier, backed by a team that has supplied and supported NSW kitchens since 2002 across 140+ brands. Current pricing, availability and the terms that apply to your site are best confirmed against the live catalogue and a written quotation.