The short answer is yes. A refrigerated smart locker is a smart locker with cooling built in, so it can hold perishable items at the right temperature until someone collects them. That covers chilled goods and frozen goods, and it is why grocery click and collect often runs ambient, chilled and frozen lockers side by side. Everything else behaves like a standard smart locker: a door opens only after access is confirmed, and every deposit and collection is logged. If you are new to the basics, our explainer on what a smart locker is sets the scene.
What chilled and frozen smart lockers are
A chilled locker keeps its compartments cold rather than at room temperature. In UK food handling, the Food Standards Agency requires cold food to be kept at 8°C or below, and recommends 5°C or below in practice, while a frozen locker holds its compartments at around -18°C, in line with how chilled and frozen food is kept across the supply chain. The point is to keep perishable items safe between the moment they are deposited and the moment they are collected, without anyone standing by the unit.
Beyond the cooling, the locker is doing what any smart locker does. The compartment stays sealed and out of sight. The door releases only when access is confirmed. The software records who opened which door and when. So a refrigerated locker is not a different category of product. It is the same workflow with temperature added to it.
Multi-temperature lockers for grocery click and collect
A full grocery order rarely sits at one temperature. There are cupboard items, there is the chilled shelf, and there is the freezer. A single-temperature locker cannot hold all three safely, which is why grocery click and collect tends to use multi-temperature banks: ambient, chilled and frozen compartments built into one set of lockers.
That means a customer collects the whole shop from one place. The picker loads the ambient items into an ambient door, the chilled items into a chilled compartment, and the frozen items into a frozen one, all against the same order. The customer opens each door in turn when they arrive. It keeps a perishable collection workable without a member of staff carrying bags out to the car. Our grocery guide covers that journey in more depth.
“For a grocery order you are juggling ambient, chilled and frozen at once, so we build all three into one bank and let the customer collect the whole shop from a single place. The cooling is the only part that changes. The access and audit software is exactly the same as on any other locker, so you keep one clean record of who collected what and when.”Bijoux M’Bayo, Retail collections & returns at eLocker · LinkedIn
Where refrigerated lockers are used beyond grocery
Cold collections are not only a supermarket problem. Anywhere a perishable item changes hands and has to be accounted for, a refrigerated locker fits the same pattern: a deposit, a collection, and a record of both.
- Pharmacy and medication. Some medicines have to be kept cold. A chilled locker lets a patient collect at a time that suits them, with the handover logged at both ends.
- Lab and clinical samples. Samples that need cold storage can be dropped and collected through a temperature-controlled unit, with a clear chain of custody behind each one.
- Food to go and meal kits. Pre-ordered lunches, ready meals and recipe boxes can wait in a chilled compartment until the customer or courier arrives.
- Workplace catering. Chilled deliveries to an office or site can sit safely until staff pick them up, rather than relying on someone being at a desk to receive them.
The software works the same way
This is the part that matters most. A refrigerated locker runs the same access and audit layer as any other smart locker. Access uses the badge technology a site already runs, or a two-factor mobile journey for customer collections. Every open and close is timestamped, so you get the same who, what and when record on a chilled door as on an ambient one.
Refrigeration adds one more thing worth logging: temperature. A temperature-controlled locker can monitor each compartment continuously and raise an alert if a reading drifts out of range, which gives you an auditable record that the cold chain held. So the collection log answers who collected what and when, and the temperature record answers whether it stayed safe the whole time it was in the locker. For regulated items such as medication or samples, that second record is often the reason a refrigerated locker is chosen at all.
Practical things to plan for
A refrigerated locker is a cooling appliance as well as a locker, so a few practical points need thinking through before you install one:
- Power. Cooling draws continuous power, so siting depends on a reliable supply. The general approach to running a bank is covered in our note on how smart lockers are powered.
- Siting. A cooled unit gives off heat and needs airflow around it, so where it sits matters more than for an ambient bank.
- Temperature monitoring. If the contents are perishable, you will want the monitoring and alerting switched on so a drift is caught early and recorded.
- Capacity mix. Decide the split between ambient, chilled and frozen doors based on what people actually collect, so you are not short of cold space at peak.
How eLocker approaches it
We treat the locker as a means to an end, and the end is automated collections and returns: a deposit and a collection that happen without a colleague there to run them, with a full audit trail behind both. A refrigerated locker extends that to perishable items, holding them at the right temperature while the same access and logging do their job. Because every door reports back, you get the usage data to size the cold and ambient mix correctly and prove what the workflow is costing and saving. If you want to see how it joins up, the wider collections and returns ecosystem shows how one platform runs across collections, returns and asset handovers.
