🚚 Refrigerated truck

A refrigerated truck is a lorry or semi-trailer with an insulated body and a cooling unit. It carries finished dairy products: cartons of milk, yogurts, curd cheese, cheeses, butter and ice cream. Unlike a milk tanker, which only keeps the cold in, a refrigerated truck makes its own cold.

The cooling unit runs on a small separate engine or on the truck's own engine. Sometimes the body is cooled with ice, dry ice or liquid carbon dioxide. Chilled dairy products are kept a few degrees above zero, and ice cream below freezing. A simple insulated van without a cooling unit does not count as a refrigerated truck.

The first successful trucks with mechanical cooling appeared around 1925, and they were made for ice cream. A big contribution came from the American inventor Frederick McKinley Jones. He created a portable cooling unit for trucks and patented it with a partner in 1940. In 2010 there were about 4 million refrigerated vehicles in use around the world.