Monitor Cold Chain Temperatures to Keep Perishables Fresh and Safe

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If you are a grower, producer or supplier of fresh or frozen perishable products, maintaining maximum quality and safety throughout the food cold chain is imperative to your success. From harvesting, processing and shipping to cold storage and delivery to grocers and restaurants, the cold chain journey is fraught with potential hazards and can take days or weeks to complete. Not only are there potentially many steps along this journey, but there are also multiple factors which can shorten your product’s shelf life, diminish its quality, or increase the chances of it becoming unsafe to eat.

Maintaining precise temperatures and real-time visibility to in-transit shipper locations are essential for proper cold chain management. Today, leading suppliers are investing in temperature-monitoring and location-tracking technologies to help them ensure that their high-value perishables are kept at the required setpoints for the duration of the cold chain journey. Emerson partners with many of these industry leaders by providing our GO real-time trackers, GO data loggers and the technological infrastructure to support these vital quality control initiatives.

Our robust solutions provide access to real-time, in-transit shipment status and historical trip data that enables stakeholders to track and monitor several key indicators related to food quality and safety, including: en route locations, shipper temperatures, environmental conditions and cargo security. Combined with our cloud-based Oversight software portal, GO real-time trackers and GO loggers are helping perishable food producers to enable continuous cold chain temperature monitoring by recording trip log data and providing live visibility to in-transit shipment locations.

Capabilities include:

• • Monitoring of temperature, humidity and ripening agents in shipping containers
  • Detecting opening of cargo doors and/or unauthorized access with available light sensors
  • Real-time alerts are issued when cargo temperatures deviate from specified parameters
  • Online and mobile access to historic and real-time shipment information, insights and trends
  • User-friendly displays of summaries of preferred shipment data
  • Automated record-keeping of perishable shipments

Make real-time decisions to avert potential food quality issues

Equipped with this mission-critical cold chain data, producers can make informed decisions and respond in real time to conditions impacting their perishable products. Here are a few common scenarios:

• • Divert a shipment. If a refrigeration issue arises on a refrigerated shipping truck mid-shipment, producers can divert the shipment to a local retailer or cold storage facility to preserve food quality and avoid loss.
  • Locate lost or stolen cargo. If a shipment veers off-course — due to shipper error or potential theft — producers can immediately locate the shipment and take corrective actions.
  • Ensure temperature certainty. If a driver/shipper intermittently deactivates the refrigeration system to save fuel, producers get real-time notifications when the temperature deviates from its setpoint.
  • Resolve disputes. By tracking and automatically documenting the temperature and condition of perishables throughout the cold chain journey, producers can validate the temperatures to help resolve potential disputes on receipt.
  • Support transportation agreements. Many producers are actively participating in transportation and logistics agreements with their retail partners that require in-transit temperature monitoring to ensure supplier cold chain integrity.

At Emerson, we’re providing cold chain solutions to enable robust temperature-monitoring and location- tracking capabilities to help perishable food producers achieve the maximum quality and safety of their products. We’re ready to work with you and your partners to create a strong cold chain that supports your unique requirements. View our food safety infographic to learn more.