Cool roof for the food industry and cold storage

A cold store, a cutting room or a dairy holds a setpoint temperature at all times. The roof is the most exposed surface of the building. A dark roof absorbs solar radiation and passes part of that heat on to the premises and to the equipment installed on it. Condensers mounted on the roof then work in air that is already warm, and their efficiency drops exactly when cooling demand peaks. Cool roof cuts this heat at the source. The surface stays close to ambient temperature and the temperature under the roof drops by 8 to 10°C in summer.

Three families of roofs dominate the food industry building stock. Steel deck covers many recent plants and platforms. It heats up fast and corrodes at the sheet overlaps. Insulated sandwich panels equip refrigerated cells, with many roof details to treat. Bituminous membrane is still very common on older buildings: 80% of the roofs treated by Covalba fall into this category and are more than 10 years old. Our pages on cool roof on steel deck and cool roof on bituminous membrane detail the preparation specific to each substrate, and CovaMetal 20 treats steel deck that is already corroded.

The main constraint of a food industry site is sanitary before it is technical. Any intervention in a production area means a shutdown, a full clean and a return to compliance before restart. Cool roof avoids that scenario. The application is 100% roof-side, machines on the ground and hoses on the roof, with no removal and no entry into the premises. Foodstuffs are never exposed. Your HACCP plan, the site’s hygiene reference framework, stays unchanged, and the cold chain is not interrupted. The works follow your roof access rules and your prevention plan.

The tertiary buildings of a food industry site fall under the décret tertiaire, the French tertiary decree, logistics platforms and retail surfaces first of all. It requires final energy consumption to be cut by 30% by 2030, 40% by 2040 and 50% by 2050, with an annual declaration on the OPERAT platform. Cool roof reduces the heat that cooling production has to offset, with no structural works and no site closure. The cooling savings are then declared on OPERAT and count towards the site’s targets. Our page on cool roof for logistics covers large warehouses.

Reflective coating works fall under standard sheet BAT-EN-112 of the French energy saving certificates scheme, which targets tertiary and industrial buildings. Eligibility depends on the heating and cooling equipment of the site, on the absence of a reflective coating before the works and on the performance of the product after ageing. Covalba checks these conditions during the study and files the application with your energy department. The French rules on cold storage energy requirements set the wider framework.

An application is planned outside rainy and freezing periods, ideally in spring so the effect is there from the first summer. The works last from a few days to a few weeks depending on the surface, with no production downtime. Everything starts with a roof diagnosis, covering the substrate condition, the access points, the roof details and the choice of system. Cool roof costs €20 to €25/m² supplied and applied, against €80 to €100/m² for a new membrane, and it pushes replacement back by 8 to 10 years. The CovaSeal 20 reflective waterproofing page covers roofs whose waterproofing is already tired.