US company comments on China’s post-harvest cold chain

Within the produce industry, shelf life is always a concern. “It has impact on shrinkage and shrinkage impacts profitability,” says Fred Wu with DeltaTrak. “Our role is to track what happens to temperature conditions during storage and transportation.” In case of a bad arrival followed with a claim, DeltaTrak’s products report and record what happened during transportation. “We can provide evidence if any temperature excursions occurred during the trip, for how long and who may be responsible. You can compare us with the black box in an airplane,” said Wu.

DeltaTrak is a data-service company that can track temperatures from harvest, to pre-cooling, cold storage, transportation and retail. “We started out in the US, but expanded globally to follow our customers. In today’s economy, fruits and vegetables travel year-round all over the globe,” mentioned Wu.

DeltaTrak’s devices are designed with a patented “shadow logging” feature which guarantees the availability of the trip data even if the operator forgets to activate the device. This is a very important feature along with every unit being serialized and traceable to a NIST reference standard. The data that is recorded on the device belongs to the company that incurred the expenses for the device and is used in case of an arbitration or legal proceedings for settling a dispute. Tracking the temperature during transportation is crucial from a commercial and regulatory compliance perspective, especially with the new Food Safety Modernization Act implemented this year.

One of DeltaTrak’s key markets outside the US is China. “It’s a big market where things happen very quickly,” said Wu. The country looks at the West and tries to mimic that infrastructure of warehouses for cold storage. However, the Chinese government plays a significant role as it decides in what region cold storage funding will be allocated. When it comes to road infrastructure, access roads are not as well developed outside the major metropolitan areas. In addition, post-harvest knowledge needs to be developed in the country. “It is not well understood how to apply different temperature management conditions for different commodities throughout the cold chain,” shared Wu. Even at the basic level, vehicles are not always refrigerated. “In China, there is a high likelihood of the cold chain being broken during any post-harvest stage.” 

On the upside, Chinese companies are becoming much more progressive. With 1.3 billion people, companies want to represent their products well. “A lot of Western companies are trying to enter China as they see opportunities. Today, the country is mainly an importer of fresh produce, but over time, it will be a major player in exporting fresh produce all over the globe,” shared Wu. “The cold chain needs to be much further developed in order to become a successful exporter.”

For more information:

Fred Wu

Phone: (925)-249-2250

E-mail: dtfwu@deltatrak.com