Every refrigerated carrier will tell you their cold chain is solid. The way to test the claim costs nothing: ask what they can prove, about one specific delivery, after the fact. Here are the five questions we’d ask any carrier, including us.
1. Is temperature recorded against my consignment, or just the vehicle?
A vehicle log tells you a trailer was cold. It doesn’t tell you your product was on that trailer, in that compartment, during those hours. Per-consignment recording ties the temperature history to your delivery reference, which is the thing a retailer’s QA team actually asks for. If the answer is “we can work it out from the vehicle data”, that’s a reconstruction, not a record.
2. How fast can you hand me the trace for one delivery?
The moment you need a temperature trace is the moment a customer is holding a load at goods-in. An answer measured in days is worthless; the load gets rejected before the evidence arrives. Ask for the trace of a real recent delivery during the sales conversation and watch what happens. Minutes is the right answer.
3. Can your people read the trace?
A raw temperature line needs interpretation. Brief spikes that align with delivery stops and recover quickly are door openings, which are normal. A sustained climb with no recovery is a failing unit. A carrier whose office can’t tell you which is which will lose a defensible dispute, because the evidence only works when someone explains it.
4. What happens in transit when a unit deviates?
Monitoring that nobody watches is decoration. Ask who gets alerted when a unit drifts, and what they’re authorised to do about it: divert the vehicle, transfer the load, call you. The specifics matter less than whether an actual procedure exists and the person answering can describe it without checking.
5. Does the proof of delivery tie back to the same reference?
The end state you want is one evidence chain per delivery: booking reference, temperature record and electronic proof of delivery all pointing at each other. When those live in three systems with three references, disputes turn into archaeology.
Where the bar is
None of this is exotic. Continuous per-consignment recording, fast retrieval, readable traces, a deviation procedure and a single evidence chain. That’s table stakes for chilled and frozen work done properly, and it’s what BRC-accredited operations get audited on. If a carrier can’t show you these five things, the price per pallet is measuring the wrong risk.
