The history of industrial food refrigeration dates back to the late 1800s when consignments of frozen meat from Australia, New Zealand and South America began to be routinely shipped to the UK and Europe. 

The need to guarantee the safe high quality storage and transportation of perishable foods became critical during the 1st World War due to the requirement to feed millions of troops.  Research was needed on the refrigeration of meat and other perishable products. To meet these needs the Low Temperature Research Station (LTRS) was established at Cambridge. LTRS carried out much of fundamental research into the relationship between food temperature/time and the safety and quality of meat. In the mid-1960s the Government decided to close LTRS and a number of other food research centres and establish two new research institutes bringing together the countries red meat experts at the Meat Research Institute (MRI) Langford Bristol and experts on other foods, including poultry, at the Food Research Institute at Norwich. 

In September 1967 investigations were started on a programme of research into meat refrigeration at the new Meat Research Institute (MRI) under construction at Langford near Bristol.  In 1985 the MRI became the Institute of Food Research – Bristol Laboratory (IFR-BL) and that programme now extended to cover the refrigeration and thermal processing of all foods.  On the closure of the IFR-BL this work continued on the same site under the auspices of the University of Bristol’s Food Refrigeration and Process Engineering Research Centre (FRPERC) until 2009.  In 2009 FRPERC transferred its activities to the Grimsby Institute where it continued its activities until 2023.  This programme of experimental and theoretical studies has resulted in numerous developments and publications covering chilling, freezing, thawing, tempering, storage, transport, display of refrigerated foods.  This paper/presentation describes the development of food refrigeration research over the total period.
For further information on this event, visit: https://bcryo.org.uk/history-food-refrigeration-and-process-engineering-research-centre-and-its-role-food-refrigeration