Although some of the temperature-controlled transportation services offered in Australia deal with the maintenance of medium to high temperatures, the vast majority of them are for refrigerated goods. In this guide, you will discover more about refrigerated transport and the principal technologies that are employed today that helps to ensure goods arrive in a comparable state to the condition they were packed in.

Types of Transportation

In the main, perishable goods are transported in reefer trucks, the colloquial term for heavy-duty refrigerated vehicles. Typically meat and dairy products would be transported in such a truck because of the high volume of demand in those sectors. Reefer trucks have variable temperature settings. What might be suitable for fresh-cut flowers might be too high for newly slaughtered carcasses on their way to a food processing plant, for example. In addition, there are refrigerated vans which tend to be used for smaller-scale deliveries, often in a business-to-consumer context. The largest scale units of all are refrigerated containers. These can be used to send chilled or frozen foodstuffs over very long distances indeed. Rail, truck and even ocean-going refrigerated containers are now used all over the world.

Other Forms of Temperature-Controlled Delivery

It is not just refrigerated transport vehicles that play their part in the chilled supply chain. These days, many logistical arrangements are made without the need for vehicles with any form of built-in refrigeration at all. This means that trucks and vans can be used to transport temperature-controlled items as well as general cargo. Usually, a seal box or storage unit is used. A carefully chilled ice pack is then added, which will commonly house a special gel that is designed to retain its current temperature for a long time. With the sort of thermal insulation properties that modern containers can achieve, chilled items in them can remain at a very similar temperature for hours on end. However, for longer delivery schedules, there is no substitute for fully refrigerated transport.

Climate-Controlled Storage

Increasingly, very sensitive products that are susceptible to a variation in temperature of just a few degrees, either way, are being sealed into climate-controlled storage units. These are then placed into conventional refrigerated transport vehicles which are, themselves, insulated. Such double insulation means that fluctuations in the external temperature will have only a negligible effect on the goods stored inside. This approach is ideal when the entire storage unit will be unloaded from the refrigerated truck that is conveying it for it to go directly into chilled storage, such as those located at most supermarkets nowadays.

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