No one wants to hear the term 'food safety' followed by 'scare', as governments up the ante on fresh produce inspections. Retailers want fruit to have the best possible shelf life too, so for reasons of health and marketability the issue of temperature in the supply chain is vital. No logistics system can be perfect, but at www.freshfruitportal.com we catch up with carriers and a cold chain technology consultant to discuss minimizing liability risks and the gaping holes that currently exist.

Krujex Transport Corporation president Daniel Visan understands the importance of temperature monitoring, but like many trucking companies his Oregon-based business has often had to bear the cost of others' inefficiencies.

"I've been in this business since 1979 doing produce and probably the two main problems that we encounter consistently are a lack of transparency in loading and unloading the product, and that affects both temperature and the quality of the packaging," he tells www.freshfruitportal.com.

"It's bad throughout the year but especially in the hot season in California or Arizona, and even in the Northwest with cherries and apples when they first start getting picked, and we end up with a product that is hotter than what we’re supposed to load it at.

"For instance we’ll be at a shipper and the product needs to be at 34°F (1.1°C) and it says on their billing loadings that’s where it needs to be, however we've given our drivers laser thermometers to test the product."

Visan says it is not uncommon during loading for his drivers to point their laser guns at the pallet and get a reading anywhere between 40-55°F (4.4-12.7°C).

"So it doesn't get cooled properly, and there’s a slew of reasons why that happens, but mainly because there’s not enough storage space to cool the product down adequately.

"I tell my drivers that below the signature with the shipper to write the variation in temperature, but it's happened to us a whole bunch of times that when the receiver sees it as 40-55°F for example, they take the bills, tear them up and tell us to unload the product of the truck."

Packaging quality

On the topic of packaging quality,Visan cites an example a few years ago of a trade-off between an apple shipper and a receiver, which ended up with Krujex losing between US$500-1,200 per load.

"We were hauling apples out of the Pacific Northwest and every time the product stacked seven tiers high; the bottom row of boxes constantly were bulging when we were unloading them, so despite the fact that we have the right equipment, trucks and trailers, when we got to the destination these boxes were inadvertently rejected," he says.

"We started taking pictures and rejected anything that was bulging, but the shipper told us we either take the freight the way it is or if not they’ll make sure we never do any business with their company again, whether it’s direct or indirect.

"So, what it ended up being was we decided not to haul to the other company."

He clarifies that since then truck containers have got bigger and there is now no need for such high stacking, which has improved the situation. On the topic of temperature however, Krujex highlights some obvious cases that need improvement.

Ambiguous open doors

He says the introduction of laser thermometers has substantially eliminated a great deal of risk, but in some cases shippers will not allow drivers on the dock, so they have to take these shippers at their word.

"Anybody who knows anything about the produce business knows you can have some product that got picked yesterday and it’s been sitting in the cooler, but there’s not enough to fill the order so they fill with product just picked today.

"There is no way you can get the core temperature of the product you picked today to match the one from yesterday, and because they don't let the drivers on the dock we don’t have a way of verifying what’s what.

"So when we get to the destination, rightfully so, the receiver starts taking the temperatures of every single palate off the truck, and we end up with ambiguous temperatures."

He says in these cases the receivers understandably tend to take a "not my problem" approach and either "kick the product back or kick the freight rate down by whatever they think their loss is in the shelf life".

But it is not just at the shipper's end where problems can arise.

"You can take your product to the main markets on the East Coast, whether it be in Philadelphia, Boston or elsewhere, and they’ll leave the doors open for five, six or seven hours with the reefers blasting, not that it would matter with all the heat getting in.

"It’s not uncommon to have temperatures between 60-80°F (15.5-26.6°C) in the summer, the doors get left open and then they call the federal inspector once the produce has warmed up, but no one has taken the temperature when it arrived; there is ambiguity in the process.

"We all try to be efficient in what we do in transport and eliminate these ambiguities, but nevertheless just as the weather starts warming up, so do the claims get higher."

Temperature monitoring technology

Visan says that after so many instances where drivers haven't been allowed to take readings, he is considering running tests with Ryan Systems and Intelleflex, using RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) real time temperature monitoring technology.

The two companies recently ran field tests for the technology in shipments from both California and Taiwan to Hawaii.

"It started off running the technology with food supply between the Hawaiian islands of O’ahu, Maui and the big island Hawai’i," Ryan Systems founder Dr John Ryan tells www.freshfruitportal.com

"People thought it was a good project so we decided a couple of months ago that we would use the technology on freight holders and track it from the farms and packhouses, to the distribution centers where it would get off the truck and onto the containers, and then would be shipped to Hawaii."

He says the data collected was revealing, showing how important it was for the supply chain to know exactly how temperatures changed and where.

"What we found, and what others have found before too, is that at distribution centers or freight forwarding centers, the temperatures went out of control, rising by 5-6°F.

"For example, it should have been 55°F (12.7°C) but it was in the 60s (15.5°C+). It's not something critical but but you are losing shelf life with that."

"There was also a 4°F difference between the produce at the top of the pallets and the bottom of the pallets."

The study also found temperatures rose by around 2°F for the California to Hawaii leg, however this was not the case for fruit coming from Taiwan.

His concerns about the industry's temperature management echo those of Visan, and its an issue he hopes RFID-monitoring can assist.

"When you’re going to truck the produce it is supposed to be refrigerated, but if you open the door some of that heat gets in and it takes time for that heat to dissipate.

"I know of a trucking company that lost US$10,000 in a case where it picked up a load of fruit that was already bad; it’s vicarious liability.

"Freight forwarding companies are concerned about the liability issue, soif you are a trucking company you want to have the data to back you up if you go to court."

An air freighter's perspective

Los Angeles-based Commodity Forwarders Inc president Chris Connell tells www.freshfruitportal.com air freight could never be more controlled than the trucking industry, but there are ways to keep product cool and there is the advantage of speed.

"From a cool chain perspective, we are seeing airlines embrace the importance of perishable traffic within their networks, more so now than four years ago and we think that’s positive," he says.

"There are temperature variances from L.A. to New York but it’s really a speed versus temperature formula. We still do the same layered approach in a container going from Los Angeles to New York as we do from LA to Dubai, or to Japan or London."

Connell explains the layered approach involves several tools for keeping product cool, involving air bubbles, gel packs, dry ice, and the proper routing of cargo.

"We accept shipments at our facilities in the 12 airports that we operate in, and I’d say 11 of those 12 have refrigeration right near the airport, so when we accept a shipment from a truck, we actually take the temperature of the product itself as we take it off the truck.

"We check the core temperature, take it to the refrigerated facility near the airport and hold it as long as possible; that way we can take preventive action with pre-cooling if we need to.

"Then we keep it cold and focus on starting the loading process into the  air containers as close to the cut-off time as possible. We like keeping control of the product in our facility as long as the airlines will let us."

Unlike Visan's examples of trucks sitting with their doors open for up to seven hours, Connell says his drivers are instructed to let heat in for a minimal timeframe.

"As soon as the truck arrives, say the truck has to wait a little to get pulled off, we tell the truckers to keep the doors closed, but once a truck pulls back with the offload process, I’d say within a half hour of the process the temperature is being taken.

"Our whole goal is that we want a temperature of the product actually on the trucking bill of lading inbound, because you’re talking about liability and you need to draw a line in the sand.

"We protect ourselves by doing the temperature and we always hope that the trucker who’s bringing it in has done the same job when they picked it up from the shipper, because there are many links in the chain."

He says when the product arrives the client is informed about the temperature and any other issues, while there is also a QC service available that involves digital photos, core temperatures of individual fruit and brix measurements on request.

"Customers overseas tend to want that service, but they also understand it’s a very small sampling.

"It’s either going to allow the consignee and the shipper grower have a better conversation about what is on their way now, and maybe make corrective actions about what’s going to be coming into the pipeline the next day, so we think it’s a good measuring tool, and we’ve seen more of our European clients embrace the idea of doing a very general QC than anywhere else."

He says GPS tracking has been making its way into the air freight business, while there are hopes that pharmaceutical cool chain technology could help out produce logistics. He says current pharmaceutical air freight cooling technology is prohibitively expensive for the produce industry, but hopefully in time this will change.

www.freshfruitportal.com