Smart technologies are helping foodservice businesses ensure food quality and safety
By Nick Fryer, Sheer Logistics
When the risk of food spoilage and foodborne illness is mitigated, your customers are satisfied, and your business grows.
Cold chain logistics—the storing, handling and transporting of temperature-sensitive items—play an essential role in ensuring food safety and quality. The essence of cold chain logistics is the management of perishable food and beverages under tightly controlled conditions to prevent spoilage.
Without a functioning cold chain, food quality can deteriorate quickly. This poses health risks, threatens your brand reputation and can cause financial losses. It’s vital to understand the key aspects of cold chain management—and the key challenges to ensuring food quality and safety. Here is a breakdown of how this system works to facilitate freshness.
Temperature Controls: The First Line of Defense
The USDA states that bacteria and other food-spoilage pathogens love a warm environment between 40°F and 140°F. In this temperature range, they multiply quickly (doubling every 20 minutes), spread faster, and spoil the food. Maintaining food products within the desired temperature range reduces the possibility of spoiled food, which can cause illness when consumed. According to the NHS, the campylobacter bacteria is the most common cause of foodborne illness. To minimize these risks, optimizing cold chain logistics is crucial, ensuring that food transits at the right temperature throughout the supply chain.
Maintaining Critical Temperature Ranges
To maintain freshness, various foods need to be stored at different temperatures. Frozen foods should be kept between 0°F to -4°F to prevent them from spoiling. Dairy and fresh food should be maintained at 35.6°F to 46.4°F. Maintaining the proper temperature during storage and transit ensures food quality and freshness.
Cold Chain Logistics Challenges for the Catering Industry
By its very nature, catering presents unique challenges as compared to running a traditional restaurant. Caterers are essentially mobile restaurants, with each leg of the process (food prep, transport, set up and food service) creating potential failure points in the safe handling of food. Let’s take a closer look at these challenges and how effective cold chain management can mitigate your risk.
- Temperature Changes During Transit
Maintaining a stable temperature when transporting food for long distance deliveries can be tricky. When catering an event, you may need to transport food products that need to be maintained at different temperatures (fresh vs. frozen) on a single vehicle. This can complicate both transportation and storage. In addition, refrigerated and frozen trucks can experience breakdowns of the refrigeration or freezer unit or the vehicle itself, imperiling food freshness. The longer that your food products are in transit, the greater the risk from traffic delays, mechanical failures, and delays caused by weather.
- Last-Mile Delivery Issues
This last delivery phase—from distribution point to the final destination—can pose more challenges. Smaller delivery trucks and vehicles may lack advanced refrigeration systems, increasing the risk of temperature variation. In these instances, using insulated packaging and storage solutions can help maintain proper temperatures through the last mile.
- Storage Constraints at Events and Venues
Catering events that are held outdoors, lack cold storage facilities, or even basic air conditioning can be a challenge for caterers. To prevent food spoilage, caterers can employ a variety of solutions, including coolers and insulated containers, mobile refrigerated trailers, ice, ice bins and ice packs, dry ice, cold buffet tables, and shade tents. Even with these measures in place, frequent monitoring of food temperatures is critical throughout the duration of catered events.
How Real-Time Data and Intelligent Logistics Enhance Cold Chain Management
Smart logistics technologies have propelled cold chain management into the future, transforming temperature monitoring, predictive maintenance, traceability and compliance practices.
Today’s Internet of Things (IoT)-enabled temperature sensors continuously monitor the temperature in a refrigerated vehicle or cold storage facility, providing real-time data that can trigger alerts and notifications when temperatures fall outside of the prescribed range. In the past, cold chain temperature monitoring was conducted manually or via data loggers, with temperature issues often not being discovered until delivery, at which point the food product may have already been exposed to compromising temperatures. By proactively utilizing real-time data and automated notifications, caterers can take quick action to address temperature issues.
Predictive Maintenance Through IoT and Data Analytics
Utilizing IoT-enabled cold chain vehicles and equipment combined with data analytics makes predictive maintenance much easier and efficient. IoT devices can detect vibration levels, temperature changes, anomalies in power consumption, and variations in pressure and flow rates in hydraulic or pneumatic systems that indicate failure is imminent before it occurs and can send automated alerts to operators and maintenance teams. Proactively addressing maintenance issues before they become full-fledged breakdowns can help caterers ensure their vehicles and equipment are operating at peak performance.
Improved Traceability and Compliance
Real-time data also supports better traceability. It facilitates compliance with food safety constraints by regulatory bodies like the Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA). The FSMA’s aim is to change the food industry’s approach to foodborne diseases from reactive (treating illness) to proactive (preventing them from occurring). Such technology also allows businesses to maintain accurate temperature records in transit. This helps caterers trace any issues back to their source and address them promptly.
Cold chain logistics is essential for maintaining the quality, freshness, and safety of food in the catering and foodservice industry. By ensuring that perishable goods are stored and transported at optimal temperatures, businesses can minimize the risk of spoilage and foodborne illnesses, meet regulatory compliance standards, and deliver high-quality products to customers. Advances in real-time data monitoring, IoT technologies, and predictive maintenance offer significant improvements in managing cold chain logistics, making it easier for caterers to optimize operations and protect their brand reputation while enhancing customer satisfaction.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Nick Fryer is vice president of marketing at Sheer Logistics. Nick has over a decade of experience in the logistics industry, spanning marketing, public relations, sales enablement, M&A, and more at third-party logistics and fourth-party logistics companies, 3PLs and 4PLs, including AFN Logistics, GlobalTranz and Sheer Logistics.
