Shipping in Containers - Temperature Variability and Implications for Quality

Maintaining an optimised environment around horticultural products throughout the supply chain is key to maintaining value and uniformly high quality. Handling system attributes such as storage temperatures, gaseous atmospheres surrounding the product, rate of cooling and length of storage, all have significant impact on the rate and evenness of product quality deterioration. Optimised practice extends the selling season and reduces variability of quality in the delivered product. In recent years a number of intensive temperature surveys of refrigerated shipping systems have been undertaken to ascertain the variability within produce loads in order to guide export industries on heuristics to minimise undesirable outturns. This work has been backed by a fundamental program looking a specific engineering and operational practices that influence transport system performance. This paper will present measured data from a typical container shipment as a case study as well as outputs from the fundamental program.