If your business involves physical products of any kind, especially delicate products that are sensitive to shifts in temperature, then logistics, especially cold chain logistics, is crucial to your success. Cold chain packaging will help protect your items during transport, but ultimately, it is the transport itself that will determine how your products get from point A to point B, whether that’s a retailer or direct to a consumer.
These days, businesses have a few ways to do this, and one of the bigger choices is whether to go with intermodal or multimodal shipping. These two are very different in one crucial way, but they are similar in many other ways. So, what is the difference? First, let’s go over how they overlap.
More Than One Vehicle
One thing that both intermodal and multimodal shipping share in common is that, especially for long-distance cargo transportation, multiple transports are often involved. Cargo may first be loaded onto a large truck, then bound for a train or even a ship. Sometimes, an aircraft is the next destination. After that vehicle is used to haul the freight longer distances, there are once again transfers to another truck, perhaps bound for a warehouse or other distribution center, where cargo is finally picked up by smaller trucks, vans, or even cars for delivery to a final destination.
Intermodal Shipping
So, if both types of shipping use different vehicles, where do they differ? If you choose to go with intermodal shipping, the biggest difference is that you will be dealing with multiple vendors. The service that provides oceanic transit, for example, will not be the same vendor that handles transport by train or the vendor that receives the cargo and loads it onto a truck.
Intermodal shipping means dealing with different businesses that handle different legs of the journey.
Multimodal Shipping
As you may have already guessed, this means that with multimodal shipping, a business deals with a single contract, and that contractor interacts with different sub-carriers at each stage of the logistics chain. So even though your cold chain packaging gets similar treatment with multimodal shipping, on a contractual level, it is simpler for your company due to dealing with one vendor for the entire shipping journey.
Pick What Works For Cold Chain Packaging
Working with both types of shipping has advantages and disadvantages. You’ll need to do some research to see which is best for your specific needs. But if you want cold chain packaging for either choice, contact us and obtain a quote.
