Shipping perishables

What Is Cold Chain Monitoring?

By March 19, 2024 No Comments

For businesses that work with temperature-sensitive products, especially extremely important items such as medications, pharmaceuticals, and vaccines, maintaining the proper temperature during transportation is critical. Without good cold chain monitoring and logistics, a vaccine or medication may arrive at a pharmacy, clinic, or hospital less effective or even completely ineffective.

This means that maintaining that consistent ideal shipping temperature is critical and requires the proper use of reefer units, tarmac temperature protection, and other precautions. One way to measure the effectiveness of cold chain logistics is through cold chain monitoring, but what is this, and how does it work?

Watching What You Can’t

As the name suggests, cold chain monitoring is the practice of recording the temperature a product experiences during the shipping process. With cold chain monitoring, a business, at the end of the shipment, can get a complete breakdown of what the shipping temperature was for the cargo throughout the journey and see whether it maintained the recommended shipping temperature or, if it couldn’t, find out what the change was, and even how long the change occurred, if it eventually recovered.

In this way, once products have arrived at their destination, businesses can gauge how effective the reefer units are or whether the tarmac temperature protection worked as planned. If things didn’t play out as expected, at least the results are now there to help track and address the issues.

Chart Recorders Are Critical

There are several ways to accomplish this at varying costs, but one of the most efficient for cost and implementation is a product known as a chart recorder. The technology operates in several different ways, with varying levels of security implementation depending on what a customer wants, but the basic operating premise is always the same. This device is designed to record temperature constantly over a long period of time.

When cargo has reached its destination, the chart recorder can then be consulted to show what the temperature in a given shipment was like. Sometimes, there is a security seal in place that must be broken for the contents to be viewed as a means of ensuring that no tampering is possible. Sometimes, the technology provides data in real-time, so customers can be notified as it happens if there is a deviation in storage temperature, which allows for the possibility of intervention or at least reaching out for clarification.

If you want to protect your shipments with tarmac temperature protection that will give you good results with chart recorders, contact us and obtain a quote.