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With widespread supply chain congestion, trucking shortages, and other delays, it’s more important than ever to know where your shipment is and if it has suffered any temperature abuse. That’s where real-time data loggers can help you. With these real-time loggers, you will know the temperature, humidity and location of your products in real-time. You will be able to track truck delivery routes and get automated alerts when temperature excursions occur.

During shipments, data loggers are perhaps most commonly used to monitor temperature. Having a record of when and where temperature abuse occurs can help you to resolve any shipment problems quickly and get paid faster.
 
But, what about other environmental factors such as humidity, light, and even shock? Measuring the humidity of a shipment is often critical—particularly when shipping certain types of produce, pharmaceuticals, and even desiccants—the very materials that help to protect products from water damage.

Food loss, especially produce, is typically the result of spoilage due to temperature excursion at an early point in the supply chain. Between 10% and 14% of produce loads are rejected because they do not meet temperature requirements. The supply chain has been plagued by poor visibility and limited data, contributing to rejected loads, which are very costly (millions of dollars annually), difficult to manage, and affect the shipper’s image.

The COVID pandemic and the just-in-time inventory system have tested the global supply chain and every industry has felt the effects. Early scenes of empty shelves, shopping carts running over with toilet paper and distraught customers point to the panic buying that precipitated many of the COVID-19 product shortages. A video which was particularly telling showed a stressed young mother who was unable to find diapers for her baby. Her phone’s camera panned the ransacked store shelves, as she lamented that the only available diapers were in large multi-pack boxes…which she could not afford.

Over the past weeks, you likely have heard about the Suez Canal blockage. Indeed, one of the largest container ships in the world became wedged in one of the world’s busiest marine waterways, the Suez Canal, blocking billions of dollars’ worth of cargo from being transported out of the region. Such a blockage is devastating to the shippers of some commodities, such as food, that are highly perishable when subject to temperature abuses.

Many methods are in place, or have been tested, to provide a reliable indicator of the quality of the produce the retailer puts on the shelf for the consumer. Each of these have unique and “tried” methods of prediction, but with so many factors that influence quality and shelf life in the supply chain it would seem to be impossible to provide an all-encompassing method.

It is now approaching 2 years since the Chinese FDA began a push to adopt their proposal for regulations around Good Supply Practices (GSP) within China.

Although these regulations closely mirrored the EU GDP guidelines, and were focused on a ‘risk approach’ to managing quality, the expectation is for full adherence of these new regulations by the end of 2015.

It seems like every time you pick up a trade journal, some company or the other is offering a last mile solution.

Whether this is a special package that has been validated for "x" amount of hours, or a device no different than a basic chemical indicator that will give you a good or bad forensic analysis after the event.

Ease of mind is what you want when you transport a large quantity of consumable product. Trust is what you need in the solutions that are monitoring your various perishable commodities, especially once they leave your domain. DeltaTrak’s reliable temperature monitoring solutions are made specifically for all points in the cold chain process.