The news is full of reports covering everything from supply chain shortages to distribution issues and even product theft. But there’s one part of the supply chain we don’t tend to hear much about the cold chain. It’s a significant part of our everyday distribution and supply chain, responsible for vital medicines, important pharmaceuticals, and a great deal of the food we eat every day. One of the worst things that can happen along a cold chain is spoilage or damage to the products due to diet and time-temperature abuse. Sometimes this is caused by equipment failure, carelessness, or accidents. To prevent issues along your cold chain, it’s important to use tools like temperature sensors to help attenuate impossible damage. In this article, we’ll look at four reasons to use advanced temperature sentences to get the most out of protecting your precious cargo.
Temperature Problems In The Cold Chain
If there’s one thing about the cold supply chain you’ll be thinking about often, it’s temperature. Because of the nature of cold chain logistics, temperature plays a pivotal role in ensuring product quality and integrity. Shipping food, medicine, and other perishable items require some finesse. Temperature problems in the cold chain can be caused by many different things. Equipment failure (power outages and broken equipment) is a big one. The same goes for improper product storage and handling during transport. Sometimes, the temperature falls and causes damage/spoilage. These temperature problems eventually lead to food safety issues, waste, spoiling, revenue loss, profit loss, lawsuits, and myriad other problems. No organization wants something like that to happen! That’s why it’s so critical to maintain your cold chain integrity and prevent problems wherever possible in the cold chain.Â
Maintains Cold Chain Integrity
Maintaining the cold chain is essential for ensuring the quality and safety of food (or other perishable products). Advanced temperature indicators/sensors are ideally suited to this purpose. They efficiently help maintain cold chain integrity by giving users real-time temperature information. With this knowledge at hand, any business can take corrective action if necessary to prevent food or product spoilage. Some solutions, like SpotSee’s FreezeSafe temperature sensor, are incredibly reliable and affordable. Keeping it open as an option for your cold chain management means you can ensure the viability and quality of your goods throughout the entire chain. Various powerful cold chain technologies help maintain cold chain integrity and should be utilized often to help reinforce logistics across the company.Â
Easy To Read
A temperature sensor would be useless if it weren’t ready to read and understand. Usually, this is accomplished through a color-changing mechanism within the device itself. Some standard temperature indicators use a chemical dye or a bacterial enzyme that fills in as temperature changes. Others have a more advanced system in place that will still change color but can be used multiple times. Depending on your needs, you can get sensors that will work for multiple temperature ranges and be able to provide critical insight into when temperature abuses occur and how long exposure is happening along your supply chain.
Traceable
In addition to providing a wealth of real-time data, advanced temperature sensors can also be used to help protect the safety of your products. Part of the way they do that is by being traceable. A good temperature sensor should have a built-in serial number. This is a good thing for a variety of reasons. Having the ability to trace your sensors across every route, every truck, and the entire chain can be a great way to monitor your goods in real-time. It also creates more accountability across the board, ultimately giving you the tools you need to protect the temperature of your most vital cargo—whether its tissue samples, food supplies, or life-saving pharmaceuticals.
Cost-Effective
Using temperature sensors is cost-effective for your business in general, but more advanced sensors can really kick your monitoring up a notch. The temperature sensor can be used for multiple applications and isn’t limited by the virtue of its design. They can be applied to more than one product and locations can exist as stickers and can have a range of temperature sensitivities. They have a long lifespan so they can last throughout the entire trip. Once used, however, many temperature indicators will actually demonstrate when time-temperature abuse occurs. This can save a lot of money in the long term because it can help you revamp your storage/traveling procedures or give you insight into equipment failures. They’re also quite a low cost and high accuracy, making them an ideal tool for monitoring your supply chain. When you want more transparency within your cold chain management system with the added bonus of being able to pinpoint exactly where a problem occurs along your cold chain, a temperature sensor is a great investment.
