When you run a food business and you need to be able to keep your stock or your ingredients as fresh as possible, purchasing or hiring a vacuum packer is the ideal solution. However, when you start actively searching for one of these most useful of machines, you’ll soon realise that there are a lot to choose from, and that you’ll need to think carefully before making your decision.

Perhaps the most important element to think about when you are going to buy or hire a vacuum packer is the size. Getting the size right is going to help you immensely when it comes down to doing the job.

Smaller Kitchens

If you don’t have a lot of space, don’t produce a lot of food that needs to be vacuum packed, or if you’re simply getting one of these units to use at home, then you’ll be better of having a smaller vacuum packer. That way, you’re not taking up vital surface space that you will need to prepare the food on, for example.

Plus, of course, the smaller the unit the less it will cost. If your business is small or you want to vacuum pack items for your personal use, paying out a huge amount of money for something that you won’t see a return on is not a good idea. Pay less for a smaller unit and use that instead.

You can also find a machine that has exactly the right settings too – a larger machine would be a more industrial vacuum packer, and could have a lot of settings that you will never use. You’ll be paying out for unnecessary settings that you won’t need and that will put the initial purchase price or monthly rental up.

Medium Kitchens

A medium sized vacuum packer can also be hugely useful in a smaller kitchen if you have a lot of work to do that will require it. And of course, it is ideal in a medium sized kitchen. Most of the mid-sized vacuum packers come with wheels, so they don’t need to be kept on a work surface giving you more overall space.

Plus, for medium sized kitchens a vacuum packer on wheels can be a great asset – you can move it from place to place, and only need to buy one for the entire kitchen to use rather than a number of units that are set in place.

Large Kitchens

In a large kitchen where there is going to be lots of food to vacuum pack, you are going to be better off hiring or buying a big vacuum packer so that you can be sure it is going to cater to all of your needs.

You might choose to have one large vacuum packer that can deal with a vast amount of work each hour rather than a number of smaller ones. This could work out much more cost effective and give you more room to work with in your kitchen. Since space in a large kitchen is just as important as space in a smaller one – perhaps more so as there will be more people working there, each needing to keep safe and out of the way of each other and the equipment within the kitchen.

As mentioned above, larger vacuum packers are going to have more settings to use, giving you a lot more options. In a larger kitchen that delivers a greater variety of dishes, having a sous vide option, for example, could help you to cut down on prep time and become more productive.