Shipping products long distances without damage or spoilage can be as much luck as it is science. While perfect order fulfillment is a goal every logistics manager can agree on, achieving it is not just a matter of picking the right transportation mode. It involves taking a broad view of shipping’s impact on product quality. That means understanding the full scope of transit threats and orchestrating a meaningful response in terms of design and execution on the ground.
Regulatory pressure is raising the floor for everyone
Requirements related to the transportation of food have become more specific and more stringent over the past decade. This is part of why food and beverage transportation has become an area where many brands are choosing to partner with specialized logistics providers rather than managing it internally. These requirements include maintaining the proper temperature during transit, ensuring that the vehicle and equipment are clean and in good condition, protecting food during transportation, and training of carrier personnel in sanitary transportation practices.
Temperature is a range, not a number
Many shippers try to ensure that the cargo reaches a specific temperature. However, the real problem is the temperature excursion, which refers to those small but harmful temperature spikes that occur when the cargo is being loaded, during cross-docking transfers, or while it is being transported over the last mile.
For instance, if a refrigerated trailer is set to 34°F, there can potentially be hot spots near the doors or on the walls where the cargo was poorly loaded and where the air was not properly circulated. The goods located on these spots can be exposed to temperatures 10 to 15 degrees above the desired ones for hours.
It is not enough to rely only on high-quality equipment to solve this problem. It is also essential to adhere to specific loading and unloading rules. Here, the palletization strategy is critical. The way in which the pallets are loaded should allow the air to flow between them. Moreover, the weight should be fairly distributed over the pallets in order to avoid excess pressure on the pallet below. The pallets should not touch the trailer walls.
Regarding non-refrigerated goods, the problem lies elsewhere. For example, when these products are transported in a container over long distances during the summer, the external heat can pass through the walls of the container and easily damage the goods. In these cases, a more elaborate insulation approach can be needed.
Moisture does more damage than most shippers expect
Condensation during intermodal transfers is a known issue. As trailers move from a warm warehouse to a freezing rail yard, and then on to a humid port to be loaded onto a warmer but still temperature-controlled ship, condensation can form on interior walls and ceilings of shipping containers and drip down onto the cargo floor. Properly placed moisture-absorbing desiccants within the load will help reduce the amount of untreated moisture available in a load and allow users to avoid adding to the cost of the desiccant used in the load’s dunnage.
IoT devices can map humidity, so as many as 12 strategically placed desiccants (roughly $1 each in materials) will suffice in the 2,000 cubic feet of a standard 40 ft container to achieve dramatic improvements in moisture uptake. Low-tech and low-cost with a smart technology assist, but provides customers real-time monitoring and options for taking immediate actions at the container level to correct problems.
Shock and vibration are the overlooked variables
About one-third of all food produced for human consumption is lost or wasted globally, and much of that is lost in transit. But what if the trailers and pallets could tell us what went wrong in transit? It turns out that they can. Sensor networks are now cost-effective enough (generally leveraging the ever-more wireless connectivity of trailers) to monitor a huge variety of things, such as shocks and vibration, light (indicating potential tampering, with spoilage, or with theft), temperature (for food safety), humidity (including refrigeration unit status), air pressure (perhaps revealing a puncture), or even pathogens in the surrounding air. By adding more intelligence to the trailer or pallet, we can learn more, and improve both transit and the conditions at either end.
Route selection isn’t just about speed
Some of the riskiest routes are the short ones. A seemingly straight shot from point A to point B could have such high frequency of delay – either due to congestion or weather – that it becomes a worse option than the circuitous, but more open, route. A safety review can suss out the facts. Or short routes are only served by a single carrier with a backup plan that is woefully inadequate for your requirements. Again, that’s a solvable problem if you tackle it with data.
Cross-docking can be a powerful tool to reduce transit time. But if the network solution is favored over the product’s care, you are shipping on an untethered risk. Evaluate these vital hand-off points with the same care you would an overseas carrier.
Shipping long distances is a chemical, physical, and biological event and it takes a toll on your products. However, good practices can predict, monitor, and control these effects. Your tests may still be positive, but if your confidence is rock solid in the controls you have in place, it becomes another expected result rather than a crisis.
