Easy-to-install temperature monitoring can prevent big losses when your trailers are left unattended.
It could be argued that your ability to ensure the safety of the food you transport comes down to one word – control. You can invest in the best reefers and other equipment. You can hire great drivers and provide the training they need to be compliant. You can adopt temperature monitoring to track food and ambient temperatures throughout the time it is in transport.
These are all things you can control. And they are also things you should control.
Unfortunately, however, there are typically points in a cargo’s journey when you won’t have control. These points should concern you, as they represent a significant risk to your business.
I’m talking about the times when your trailers are either out of your hands or, at the very least, out of sight. For example, when you need to leave a trailer unattended at a terminal or other transfer point to be picked up by another driver. During that time, you don’t have control over that trailer and its contents.
Instead, all you have is trust – trust that your reefer will operate as it should, trust that the trailer won’t be carelessly opened by an individual unaware of the risks, and trust that neither your equipment nor the cargo will be tampered with.
As you might imagine, trust is no way to ensure food safety or compliance.
Moving Beyond Trust
The good news is that you can now move beyond the risks of “trusting” to having confidence that the food you transport stays safe. Cost-effective temperature tracking devices are now available that you can easily install in your trailers to help you keep close tabs on food and ambient temperatures, even when trailers are left unattended.
The readings from these telematics-enabled devices, which take temperature readings continually, can be viewed remotely, and compiled over time to show trends and make it easy to identify problem areas or times when food is at risk.
When installed in all your refrigerated trailers, as well as in shipping containers, cool rooms, and across your entire cold chain it’s like enveloping the food in a powerful safety net. I encourage you to research these temperature tracking options and discover how they can help protect your business.
Peace of Mind
By establishing a true temperature monitoring safety net, you’ll not only attain greater control over your fleet, your cargo, and your ability to deliver safe food safely to customers – you’ll also mitigate a serious business risk.
While it is possible to attach a dollar figure to food that spoils or can’t be consumed because of temperature concerns – always a significant cost – the peace of mind that comes with having greater confidence in the safety of the food your transport is hard to calculate – or to overestimate.
