Avoid Buying Frozen Foods With This Telltale Sign Of Trouble

Grocery stores are supposed to be reliable places where you can stock up on everything you need to eat for the week ahead, and for the most part, they are. However, no grocery store is immune from trouble, and in some cases, you'll find food you're better off avoiding. While there are many frozen meals you should keep out of your cart, there is another problem that you should keep your eyes peeled for while combing through your local store's freezer section: frost buildup. 

Ice isn't exactly out of place in a freezer, but when you notice an excessive buildup of it when shopping, you might want to start thinking of other things to make for dinner. Ice can build up in commercial freezers for many reasons; one of the most common is an improperly closed door or broken door seal. When this happens, warm outside air is able to enter the freezer and condense into frost. Over time, this can lead to an accumulation of ice crystals. Unfortunately, the influx of warm air could also have started thawing the frozen food, leading to, at best, undesirable freezer burn or, at worst, spoilage. 

Alternatively, the frost buildup could be caused by overstocking. If a freezer unit is overfilled, the air has a harder time circulating properly to cool everything evenly. This can result in a rise in temperature that potentially compromises food quality since the poor airflow cannot maintain a steady temp. Freezers should be kept at 0 degrees Fahrenheit; when frozen goods are stored at temps above that, their shelf life plummets and they could spoil, leading to a food safety mistake you should avoid. 

So, are foods inside icy freezers inherently dangerous? Well, potentially. It all depends on how long the issue has been occurring and whether or not a safe temperature has been maintained. Your best bet would be to point the problem out to the store so that, hopefully, it gets fixed soon. Now, if you lack alternatives, you can see whether or not the freezer has a thermometer and check if it's set to 0 degrees, which would make things safe. But even still, the frost buildup likely didn't happen overnight, and there's no way of telling whether or not the freezer has maintained that temperature. 

Moreover, even if the food isn't spoiled, a significant accumulation of frost on the food items themselves means they've probably been sitting there for a while untouched. They're also likely to be freezer-burned due to their storage conditions. Sure, it could be safe to eat, but the freezer burn will drastically alter the taste and texture of your meal, and not in a good way. There are many ways to upgrade frozen dinners, but once they're freezer-burned, there's little you can do to salvage the situation.