Many business and authorities make sure that their cool-chain temperatures are maintained at receipt and during production or processing, but many people forget about making sure that the cool-chain is maintained during dispatch and delivery.
Pallets of goods sometimes spend some time sitting on the dock in hot weather waiting for the forklift driver to be free to load the pallets into a truck. These really should have been left in the coolroom until the last minute. Cartons of goods will be placed on the dock to wait for loading into a vehicle, or if they were just delivered, waiting to be put away properly.
Maintenance of the cool-chain is vital to ensure that many types of goods are kept safe.
It’s not only food that may be compromised if the cool-chain is broken & items are left in the hot sun, blood products and vaccines are also temperature sensitive and can be made unsafe if they are not kept at correct temperatures.
If you are transporting or receiving temperatures sensitive goods you need to ensure that temperatures have been maintained throughout the chain. Checking temperatures on receipt is a good start, however if the vehicle delivering the goods has data logging, you can request these records from the transport company from time to time to spot check that they are delivering goods safely.
If blood products or vaccines are being delivered in an esky, then a simple data logger can make the difference between ‘knowing’ that the cool-chain hasn’t been broken & ‘hoping’ that the cool-chain has been maintained & the goods are safe for use or consumption.
Data loggers are no longer hard to set up or use, and they are very inexpensive. In fact there are data loggers which require no software – just pop into the USB port of the computer & the whole temperature log of the transport can be immediately downloaded & displayed as a pdf. Data loggers can have external probes which can be run into a carton or a pallet or cool-bag. These days it is a simple matter to make sure that these critical temperatures have been maintained and goods are safe for use.
Make sure your cool-chain is maintained.
