What’s a Cold Chain?

A cold chain is a temperature-controlled supply chain. An unbroken cold chain is an uninterrupted series of storage and distribution activities which maintain a given temperature range.

For example your hamburger patty is made in a food manufacturing plant, stored in cold storage warehouse, eventually loaded onto a refrigerated truck for delivery to the supermarket, stored in cold storage again and finally displayed in the cold meat section.

The chain in this case consists of 5 or 6 separate storage or transport activities, each of which attempts to keep the temperature of the hamburger consistent. (Not taking into account you leaving it on the back seat of the car on the way home!)

Why is the cold chain important?

If food-produce (obviously not just hamburgers) is subjected to temperature “abuse” then the potential for spoilage or food poisoning is greatly increased. This is particularly true in hotter climes. The potential impact is even greater for vaccines…

There is a significant global trend to the use of more perishable, fresh, chilled (and frozen) foods, and temperature sensitive biomedical/pharmaceutical products. At the same time there is an increasing concern by processors, retailers, consumers and governments to assure the safety and quality of these temperature sensitive products, is not jeopardized by hazardous handling prior to consumption.

The value of domestic cold chain products exceeds A$30 billion in Australia alone, and is growing. This is largely refrigerated Road Trailer or Railcar on terrestrial routes. Global Sea/Air perishables refrigerated movements exceed 52 million tonnes per year with growth rates exceeding 5%.

Cold chains can be managed by a quality management system - they can be analyzed, measured, controlled, documented, and validated. However multiple hand offs between each of the distribution points, a variety of different parties involved and a lack of understanding as to what’s happening to the goods at any particular time, means that you’re never entirely sure if the cold chain was maintained.

Apart from the refrigerated storage and transport, it is quite common to use “data loggers” to electronically capture and store the temperature. Data loggers come in various forms – for example refrigerated trucks have one permanently attached that draws a date/time-stamped temperature trace on a piece of paper. Others are entirely electronic and are designed to be portable.

Client Objective

The Client’s objective is a business-to-business freight management solution that would automatically trace, and monitor the distribution of temperature sensitive products to help maintain brand quality, manage food safety and security risks, and enhance supply chain efficiency and customer relationships.

Technology

Our Client, a joint venture between a government department and industry investors, was developing a disposable data logger that could be attached to an individual pallet of chilled or frozen goods and travel with it for the life of journey. The key difference between this logger and existing ones was that it wirelessly transmitted its current temperature reading to a nearby base station that then forwarded it on via the public mobile network.

In conjunction with application servers analyzing the data in near real time and forwarding alerts to interested parties, it provides consignors of perishable cargo with reliable and actionable traceability of their consignments and allows them to react more responsively to any abuse of the consignments.

CyberSoft was involved in the design of all areas of the end-to-end solution including:

• Embedded device design
• Wireless network sensors
• Device Power management research
• UCC/EAN128 data capture
• Device tracking and monitoring algorithms
• Application server design
• Quality Management
• System and device field trials