So I gave my kids a chore the other day—because screens were melting their brains and I couldn’t hear myself think. I told them to clean the freezer.
Not organize. Not peek inside. Actually pull things out, defrost the glacier that’s been building since 2022, and wipe it down.
About ten minutes in, my daughter—midway through chiseling a bag of blueberries loose—looks up and goes, “Wait… why does the bottom have these ridge things?”
And at first, I assumed she was just trying to stall. You know, distract me with a random question, buy herself some time. But I looked. She pointed. And yep—there they were. Raised lines across the bottom of the freezer.
I had never noticed them. Not once. Not after all the times I’ve rearranged the frozen waffles and cursed the frozen pizza boxes that refuse to lay flat.
So that night, while reheating something that definitely wasn’t meant to be reheated, I looked it up.
And… okay, the ridges actually do stuff. Like, actual stuff.
Let’s just get the obvious one out of the way.
They keep things from freezing to the bottom. Which… duh. But also, not duh. Because the thing is, when something wet or slightly defrosted touches a super-cold surface, it doesn’t just chill—it fuses. Like it’s saying, “Cool, I live here now.”
I’ve pried enough stuck bags of chicken off the freezer floor to know that. So yeah, the ridges lift things up just enough that they don’t get glued to the base. Tiny stilts. Weirdly effective.
But then there’s airflow. Apparently freezers need circulation? Which is something I never thought about. Like, you imagine the air inside just sitting there, being cold. But no. Cold air moves. It flows. It sinks, but it also spreads.
And the ridges help with that. They’re like little paths the air can travel through underneath your frozen broccoli.
I know. I didn’t expect freezer ridge science to be a thing either.
Also, they help during defrosting, which hit me personally.
There was a time (I want to say summer of ’21?) when our power went out during a storm, and when it came back on, the freezer looked like a mini flood had frozen mid-escape. Just weird puddles turned to lumpy ice. We thought it broke.
Turns out, some freezers have drainage holes, and the ridges? They’re like gutters. The melting ice travels along them. Or it’s supposed to. Ours didn’t do a great job, but that might’ve been user error more than design flaw.
Another thing: structure. The ridges aren’t just for airflow and drainage and not-freezing-to-the-floor purposes. They actually make the bottom stronger.
It’s like… corrugated cardboard, you know? Flat is weak. Wavy = strong. That applies to freezers, apparently.
If you stack three turkeys in there (don’t ask), the ridges help stop the floor from bending. Which explains why I haven’t broken ours yet. Small miracle.
Now here’s the weird part:
After reading all that, I went back to the freezer and just… stared at them. The ridges, I mean. Because they’re so basic. They don’t look important. But they do like, four different things at once and just exist quietly under your frozen lasagna.
It’s kind of genius.
And also sort of existential.
How many other tiny things in our lives are doing low-key heavy lifting while we ignore them completely? Drawer glides. Toilet tank valves. Ziplock seals. The people who put those little “press here to open” tabs on the side of a cereal box.
Now I’m spiraling. But you get it, right?
Anyway, I told my daughter the next morning.
She didn’t care.
She nodded like, “Cool,” and went back to her phone. But I felt weirdly accomplished. Like I had solved a mystery I didn’t know existed.
So yeah—next time you open your freezer, look down. Those little ridges? They’re holding the frozen fort together.
Not bad for something I hadn’t noticed in 15 years.
