Fruit is a commonplace item found in many retail environments, from specialist shops to corner convenience stores or bodegas. However, despite the ubiquity of fruits in stores, these are delicate, organic products that require a certain amount of care and planning to arrive in safe, edible condition for customers. Thanks to access to new tools, such as thermal blankets for food transportation, there are many ways to address the factors required for the safe shipment of fruit.
Physical Protection
An immediate consideration, besides using a thermal blanket for food transportation, is ensuring the physical integrity of the product. Fruit, by nature, is soft, and bumps, drops, and impacts can damage even the sturdier fruits. Some fruits, like apples, cherries, pears, apricots, and citrus fruits, have more durable skins, which means they are a bit more robust during the shipping process.
However, this doesn’t mean they are indestructible since, like human skin, even if a fruit skin isn’t pierced or cut, it can still visibly bruise, which affects the quality and sale value of the product when it arrives at its retail destination. This is where proper arrangement and packaging are important. It may save time and, for shorter trips, be more efficient to pack fruit in a pile in a single container, but for longer trips, this invites more possibility of product damage.
Proper packaging is crucial, such as cartons that separate each fruit individually. A more cost-conscious but time-consuming alternative is to wrap each fruit in a protective layer of paper individually. This helps to reduce the potential damage from impact and even from friction, as fruit skins constantly rubbing against each other due to minute shifts can also damage the skin.
Temperature
Another critical factor is the fruit’s temperature, which is where protection like thermal blankets for food transportation comes in. Different fruits have different tolerances for hotter and cooler temperatures. If food is stored at too warm a temperature, this can accelerate the ripening process. If too much time passes at these higher temperatures, the fruit may arrive at its destination overripe, or even already rotting, and thus not appropriate for sale.
Keeping fruit stored at the optimal temperature is critical at every stage of the logistics journey. However, while some stages of the supply chain may offer options such as storage in areas with environmental and temperature control, this is not always a given for every link in that chain. There may be periods where cargo is left to sit in a warehouse, on the tarmac before a plane loading, or even outdoors in a port or loading area. Thermal blankets for food transportation become a crucial protective layer at these points. Unlike powered solutions, thermal blankets for food transportation rely on physics for passive temperature control systems that preserve the internal temperature rather than artificially enforce it. This makes them the ideal stop-gap shipment measure for longer logistics routes. If you’d like to know more about protecting your fruit shipments to preserve their freshness, contact us and let us know your needs to help you find a cost-effective solution.
