Portable Refrigeration & Freezer Trailer Rentals Nationwide

The Refrigerated Trailer Fleet Game Processors Book Before the Opener

We have been in the equipment rental business for more than thirty years, and the cold side of it grew up serving kitchens that are not allowed to close. Meat processing is the same problem with a shorter fuse. A shop can run all year on one walk in and still meet the Saturday after a rifle opener with more animals in the lot than it has rail to hang them on. We run one of the largest dual purpose fleets of freezer and refrigeration trailers in the West and we own every unit on it. No broker sits in the middle marking up somebody else's equipment while a deer warms up in a truck bed. Call 866-699-5802 and a person answers, day or night, or send the quote request form and we will come back with a size and a delivery window. The same drivers back our freezer trailer rentals in Fort Collins and every other market we run.

Two very different customers call us inside the same eight weeks and they want the exact same thing. One is a cut shop that just took in eleven animals it has no rail for. The other is a guide with a camp a long way up a dirt road from the nearest cooler. Both are watching a clock that speeds up every afternoon the sun comes out. After enough of these falls, the first question we ask is not how many animals you expect. It is how many feet of rail you already have, and what day your zone opens.

Shops that have done this before book in September for a November drop, and they give us the opener date rather than a delivery date, because the opener is the number that drives the job. We keep units staged and we will take a short notice call at nine at night in the middle of rifle season, because that is when a shop finds out it is short. Either way the conversation runs about ten minutes.

Portable refrigeration built to hold a number and keep it

Every job on this page runs on the same box. One dual purpose trailer, dialed to whatever the load needs, whether that is a steady 35 degrees F for hanging animals or a hard freeze for wrapped orders nobody has picked up yet.

The box holds one number and keeps holding it through the door swings. Set it at 35 degrees F and it stays there while a cutter walks in and out forty times a shift, which is the band the California Department of Fish and Wildlife points hunters toward when it says a promptly chilled deer can be aged at 34 to 37 degrees F for about seven days before it is cut and wrapped. Push the same box the other way and it runs to about minus 10 degrees F.

It looks like what it is. An insulated cargo box on a tandem axle with the condenser up on the roof and a man door in the side wall. That side door matters more than people expect during game season, because a cutter can duck in for one shoulder without opening the rear doors and dumping the whole box of cold air onto the yard. Inside, the surfaces are NSF approved for direct food contact and sealed, with real drainage, so the unit hoses out when the season ends.

Getting it to you comes down to a flat patch and a plug. The trailer sets down fine on gravel or a packed dirt apron. Power is either a dedicated 120V, 20 amp circuit within about 100 feet of where it parks, or a generator we bring with it. These boxes are not wired for 208 to 240 volt building service, so we confirm your hookup before the truck rolls. At a camp with no power at all, the generator is the entire answer.

The 16' Utility earned its flagship spot the hard way, on jobs where a few degrees of drift would have cost somebody their inventory. The box is 16 feet long and fully insulated, riding on a tandem axle. The interior is NSF approved. One digital set point covers everything from -10°F frozen storage to a 50°F produce cooler. There are two ways in: rear double doors for pallets, and the side utility door for everyday grab-and-go.

Because we own and service the entire fleet, the trailer on your lot was prepped in our yard, not scrambled together after your call. It lives on a dedicated 120V, 20-amp circuit or a generator we supply, and it keeps its temperature whether the job runs a weekend or a full season.

Each unit holds a precise digital set-point and runs on a dedicated 120V/20A circuit or a generator. The trailers are not wired for 208 to 240V building service, so we confirm your hookup before the truck rolls.

Overflow Cold Storage for Game Processing Shops

The bottleneck in a game processing shop is almost never floor space and almost never staff. It is linear feet of hanging rail at a controlled temperature. A shop that hangs forty animals comfortably all year runs out of rail on the Saturday after a rifle opener, because the hunters who filled tags that morning all want their animal handled inside the same 48 to 72 hours. Past that the choices get ugly. Product goes on the floor, which is a sanitation problem. Or the shop turns people away, which in a small town costs it years.

So we park rail outside the building. A 6x16 Utility set behind the cut room adds roughly thirteen usable feet of rail per side wall, and at about twenty inches per hanging deer size animal that is another fourteen or fifteen head holding at 35 degrees F instead of sitting in a pickup bed. Shops that run this every fall tell us the trailer stops being overflow by the second week and becomes the intake cooler, with the walk in holding only what is already cut and wrapped.

Most shops in a hunting town run two product streams under one roof. Retail meat moves through the front counter under full inspection. Privately owned deer and elk move through the back under the federal custom exempt rule at 9 CFR 303.1, marked Not for Sale and returned to the person who owned the animal. Federal rules require the two to stay apart while the custom work is in the shop's hands. A rented box is clean on that point because it is dedicated.

The other pressure nobody plans for is donation. A shop that agreed in July to take deer for a hunger relief program still has to find room for them in November, on top of everything paying customers dropped off. We have sent the same trucks that run our refrigerated trailer rentals in Spokane into shops in the middle of a donation push. The ask never changes. Cold rail, this week, gone by December.

• Small town locker plants
• Custom exempt cut and wrap shops
• Mobile slaughter services
• Farm store processing rooms
• Deer and elk drop off stations
• Feed store game counters
• Seasonal game processing shops

Cold Storage Trailer Rentals for Ranch Harvest Days and Fair Auctions

A beef animal is not a big deer. It is a different unit of measure. A hanging beef quarter wants three to four linear feet of rail against roughly one and a half for a deer, so a ranch that harvests three or four head in a day puts a load on a cooler that behaves like twenty deer arriving at once. The 6x16 Utility takes about six to eight quarters, and two of them cover a small harvest day whole.

Harvest days cluster in the fall after calves are weaned and before real winter, which is the same stretch when the deer and elk work peaks. A shop serving both sides gets squeezed from two directions in the same six weeks. The ranches that handle it well pick the harvest date first and reserve cold storage second, instead of learning on the morning the truck arrives that the cooler is full of somebody else's elk.

County and state fair junior livestock auctions create the same spike in a single evening. At the National Western Stock Show in Denver, only 96 animals out of thousands qualify for the Auction of Junior Livestock Champions, and a winning bidder can either pay the full bid or pay the difference between that bid and a buy back price the meat packer pays. Those animals move into processing channels right after the sale, not next month.

Fairgrounds essentially never have permanent refrigerated space sized for the one night of the year that needs it. A trailer parked behind the show barn for auction week covers the sale and the two days after, then goes home. We deliver into fairgrounds the way we deliver our cold storage trailer rentals in Eugene, on a set window, with the drop point agreed first.

• Cow calf ranch headquarters
• County fairgrounds show barns
• Junior livestock auction rings
• 4-H and FFA project barns
• Mobile harvest unit stops
• Ranch scale houses
• Small town auction yards

How Many Carcasses Fit in Each Trailer Size

Rail feet, not cubic feet. This is the table our dispatchers actually use when a shop calls short.

Here is the arithmetic. We plan on about twenty inches of rail per hanging deer size carcass, center to center, which leaves room for it to swing and for a cutter to work around it. Take two feet off each end of a rail run for door clearance and airflow, and a 6x8 gives roughly five usable feet per side while a 6x12 gives about nine. The 6x16 Utility gives about thirteen. Rail on both walls roughly doubles those counts.

What moves the number is the animal and the way you hang it. A mule deer and a mature bull elk are not the same thing on a hook. Whole carcasses eat rail. Split sides eat less per animal but take more hooks. Quarter and box the product and it stops being a rail question and becomes a shelf question, at which point the same 6x16 holds far more than the carcass count suggests.

If you are guessing, guess the 6x16. It is the size most shops keep for the season and the one our dispatchers reach for the moment somebody describes a rail that is already full. The figures above are planning numbers our crews use on the phone, not a promise, and they are worth checking against your own animals. Call with your rail length and a typical intake day and we will do the math with you.

• Count rail feet, not square feet. Floor space is almost never the thing that runs out first.
• A beef quarter needs roughly twice the rail of a deer size carcass, so one harvest day can outweigh a whole opening weekend.
• Hanging whole holds fewer animals than hanging split sides, and quartering changes the math a third time.

Volumes above are working numbers our dispatchers use on the phone, not a guarantee. Tell us the coldest item on your list and roughly how much of it you are holding, and we will size the unit for you before anything is booked.

Three footprints of rental freezer trailers, compared

Our signature 16 foot Utility series leads the fleet. It is the trailer we send on most jobs, and crews like it for the side utility access door. We build three footprints in all, so a single kitchen holding overflow stock has a fit and so does a distribution floor in a disaster. Every unit is dual purpose by design: one adjustable system swings between freezer and refrigerator on a digital set point. Each trailer runs on a dedicated circuit or on a generator.

Trailer	Best for	Temp range
6x16 Utility ⭐	Our signature series: distribution, large events, disaster response, side utility door	Heavy-duty reefer
6x12	Grocers, caterers, mid-size events	Deep-freeze capable
6x8	Tight lots, small kitchens, short overflow	-10°F to 50°F

Each unit holds a precise digital set-point and runs on a dedicated 120V/20A circuit or a generator.

Not sure which size fits? Most customers land on the 16 foot Utility, and we will tell you honestly if a smaller footprint covers your job. Tell us roughly what you are storing and for how long, and we will spec it for you.

What Shops Do Instead, and What It Costs Them

Everybody in this trade has a workaround and every one has a bill attached, just not one that shows up on an invoice. A dry box truck gets pressed into service as a cooler, which only works if somebody also runs a portable cooling unit inside it around the clock. A neighbor's walk in gets borrowed, which depends on that neighbor having room in the exact week every cold box in a hunting town is full. Window air conditioners make a hot room less hot without ever reaching the band that matters.

The workaround that actually happens most often is driving further. The close shop is full, so the animal goes another two hours to the shop that is not, and the meat warms the entire way. That is the part worth sitting with, because the state agency guidance is unambiguous about what warm hours do. A carcass held at 65 degrees F for a single day has already used the whole aging window it was going to get. The fix people reach for recreates the exact risk cold storage exists to prevent.

There is one more cost that only shows up when it goes wrong. A fixed walk in is a compressor with a duty cycle, and one already running near its rated capacity to hold a normal year round load has nothing in reserve when the thermal load doubles for six weeks. The season that fills the cooler leans hardest on the one machine holding it. A second, separate box takes that bet off the table. We deliver the same way for our cold storage trailer rentals in Eugene and in every market we run.

Bars compare the exposure, not the invoice. We never quote a number on a web page, because the right answer depends on the size of the unit and the length of the rental. Call and we will price your job in one conversation.

Game Season Cold Storage Questions, Answered

Where else rental freezer trailers show up

The same trailers, dialed in for a different load. These are the operations we cold-store for most often.

We run the same trailers for refrigerated trailer rentals for Hospitals and healthcare, freezer trailer rentals for Restaurant remodels, cold storage trailer rentals for Food banks, refrigeration trailer rentals for Schools and universities and mobile cooler trailer rentals for Stadiums and concessions.

Hospitals and healthcare

Kitchens that cannot pause meal service when a walk in quits.

Restaurant remodels

Planned projects that replace the walk in without closing the doors.

Food banks

Distribution sites moving perishable donations through tight receiving yards.

Schools and universities

Campus dining kitchens feeding a fixed count on a fixed schedule.

Stadiums and concessions

Event day cold storage where the volume arrives inside a few hours.