Why Temperature Loggers are Essential for Shippers

Nothing spoils someone’s day in logistics more than a perishables shipment that gets rejected due to damage from being too hot or too cold. Product rejection frequently happens in this industry, and each time it happens, it creates a chain reaction that negatively impacts shippers and carriers. 

Shippers sometimes have to file a claim to recover their losses. The process usually causes a lot of anxiety due to the potential cost of damages. In the fresh produce business, a rejected truckload of onions might cost around $20,000, but a spoiled load of fresh organic blueberries might run over $100,000. The shipper will expect someone to pay for it. This might lead to some heated conversations with accusations that each other are to blame. Was there a mistake on the rate confirmation? Did the truck’s reefer breakdown? When was the last time the carrier calibrated the reefer? Was the reefer set at start-stop or continuous? Usually, the shipper ends up filing an insurance claim. 

With all the potential risks involved in hauling refrigerated goods, it is essential for shippers and their transportation providers to use temperature loggers on all loads for first and last mile cold chain visibility. Let’s look at some of the primary reasons why companies should use this technology.

Every Shipment Matters

Whether it’s the distribution of pharmaceutical goods, meats and dairy, fresh produce, or biotechnology, logistics professionals are responsible for ensuring that their time-sensitive shipments arrive on time without damage or spoilage. Logistics managers have limited visibility into whether their providers are correctly tracking and maintaining temperatures in their cold chain. Some shippers require their carriers to manually record a cold chain custody form by hand. Or perhaps a carrier may send a photo of their reefer temp once they were loaded to communicate with their customer that they were following proper instructions. Yet, these methods provide limited data and do not identify whether these loads experienced temperature deviations while in transit. Modern temperature loggers, however, capture temperature conditions at the shipment’s origin, at regular intervals, and at the shipment’s destination. The result is total temperature visibility on every shipment, ensuring that your perishable commodities are fully tracked each mile it’s on the road.

How Temperature Loggers Work

Traditional temperature loggers are bigger, bulkier, and harder to use.

However, the Tive Tag, a more modern temperature logger, is a reusable, paper-thin and flexible shipping label for end-to-end cold chain monitoring of temperature-sensitive products.

Invest in Technologies to Lower Operational Cost

Rejected truckloads add a significant amount to overall transportation expenditures, with one study suggesting that product rejections accounted for a 2.8% annual increase in freight budgets. Shippers have already been strained by economic inflation, capacity shortages, rising fuel costs, and global climate conditions. Investing in cost-effective temperature loggers is the easiest way for shippers to maintain a consistent high level of quality and safety throughout their entire cold chain. 

Maintain an Audit Trail for Your Compliance Needs

Food, produce, pharmaceutical, and biotechnology companies are familiar with the requirements necessary to move their goods. Perishable commodities require temperature-controlled environments to ensure quality and safety standards are met. Shippers face risks that their products will become spoiled during transport and will fail federal FSMA inspection standards. 

Ultimately, the shipper is responsible for collecting compliance documentation. Temperature trackers automatically store a digital record of each shipment, providing full-scale visibility of temperature conditions throughout the entire journey of the load and allowing shippers to download complete shipment reports.

Introducing Tive Tag - A Cloud Enabled Multi-Trip Flexible Temperature Logging Label

Imagine a cloud-enabled temperature logger, in the form of a thin, flexible shipping label, and at half the cost of a conventional logger. Now make it last for a year, design it to be reused trip after trip during that year, and then give it a non-Lithium earth-friendly battery. Introducing the Tive Tag. It’s like a shipping label – just one that has an incredible amount of tech embedded inside.

Tive already has a portfolio of award-winning cold chain innovations. The Tive Tag is a simple solution for shippers, retailers, cold storage operators, and last mile delivery. Customers have an audit trail for their compliance needs, the Tag is air freight safe, and supports your ESG initiatives with minimal electronic waste. Simply stick, tap it with your phone, and ship.

Tive Tag: Simple and Powerful Cold Chain Visibility

Start and stop the Tive Tag to define individual trips. Stick the Tag on a reusable plastic container (RPC), a carton, crate, pallet, or a box, and now you have proof of delivery and that the cold chain was maintained. Go across town, coast-to-coast, or continent-to-continent. The Tive Tag makes shipping and receiving safe and easy.