Anyone shipping a product that must be kept at a specific temperature must take special precautions to ensure that the product still arrives in viable condition at its destination. This means taking many more steps and precautions to protect the product. Here are four tips you should be considering when you ship your products using cold chain packaging.
Plan Ahead
Perhaps most crucially, businesses should have a firm understanding of their own products, their requirements, their durability, and what that will mean for shipping requirements. In some cases, if there is a time consideration in addition to a temperature factor, shipping by air is the only alternative. In other cases, however, careful planning can lead to cost-effective solutions, such as using reefer units on ships or trains.
Insulation Matters
In a perfect world, a reefer unit will always work as intended, and people won’t have to worry about what happens to their product. Unfortunately, reefer units don’t always work flawlessly, and, perhaps more importantly, products don’t remain in reefer units forever and are always at some risk of exposure. Insulation is a good way to provide an extra level of protection.
Try Temperature Tracking
For people who want up-to-date information on how their shipment is doing, technology now allows temperature monitoring of shipments. While this doesn’t necessarily mean that businesses can intervene personally if they see a change in temperature, this can help plan ahead if potential issues come up. Perhaps more importantly, if temperature monitoring reveals consistent intervals during shipment when the temperature varies, this helps troubleshoot whether there is an issue with a shipping company or some other aspect of the cold chain logistics that is failing to adhere to standards.
Use Cold Chain Packaging
There is the right tool for the right situation. If you have products that need to maintain a specific temperature, it’s not enough to trust in a reefer unit or even insulation to help keep that temperature. Specific cold chain packaging is essential, but you should get the right kind for what you require. The requirements for shipping raw food ingredients, for example, differ from those of shipping pharmaceuticals or even electronics. Always ensure that you get the type of packaging that is right for both the specific product and the volume that you intend to ship.
If you’re shipping temperature-sensitive products and want to know what kind of cold chain packaging will safely transport them to their destination, we can help. Contact us to explain your shipping needs and obtain a quote.
