Freezing time and freezing heat load are the two most important factors determining the economics of food freezers. This Brief will review and describe the principal methods available for their calculation. The methods can be classified into analytical methods, which rely on making physical simplifications to be able to derive exact solutions; empirical methods, which use regression techniques to derive simplified equations from experimental data or numerical calculations and numerical methods, which use computational techniques such as finite elements analysis to solve the complete set of...