The carriage of fresh food products or temperature-sensitive pharmaceuticals is one of the fastest growing areas of logistics today, referred to as the ‘temperature-controlled supply chain’ or ‘cold chain’ for short.

Refrigerated conditions need to be maintained from end-to-end along the chain – in ships, containers, ports, warehouses, trucks, rail or other modes of delivery – along with sophisticated temperature monitoring and alarm systems to warn of anomalies that could potentially spoil cargoes.

As the world’s population grows, and with it an affluent middle class requiring healthy foodstuffs and advanced pharma products, demand for refrigerated or ‘reefer’ goods delivered in prime condition keeps rising.

On the high seas, the norm used to be that reefer cargoes were loaded in bulk or breakbulk form into ships whose entire holds were kept refrigerated and insulated – so-called conventional reefer vessels. This segment of ships has been in steady decline over the last 10 years or more, their cargoes having switched to refrigerated containers stowed in specially equipped slots or ‘plugs’ aboard cellular liner vessels.

Older refrigerated containers tend to be of the ‘con-air’ or ‘porthole’ type, which plug into a refrigeration unit aboard ship and rely on an external source of cold air being blown into one end, with warm air extracted from the other.

These con-air boxes are gradually giving way to a new generation of ‘reefer’ or ‘integral’ containers, consisting of boxes equipped with their own individual air conditioning unit and in some cases remote monitoring unit.

Worth noting at this point is that reefer containers are not used to reduce the temperature of goods (as refrigerators do) but merely to maintain pre-existing chilled or frozen conditions – as is the requirement for other links in the cold chain.

Additionally, the airflow requirements of different commodities vary: e.g. chilled goods mounted on pallets within containers require air flowing through the cargo always, with ventilation to remove heat and gases, while frozen cargo needs to be block stowed with no gap between the cargo and walls.

Other cargoes such as certain fruit types require especially cold treatment before and during shipment to sterilise any harmful bacteria that can potentially cause disease.

Reefer Box Fleets

Maersk Line has some 270,000 reefer containers which it operates in conjunction with a Remote Container Management (RCM) system, allowing the monitoring of temperature, humidity and ventilation settings throughout the entire journey. Clients can access this information free of charge by logging on to a platform that also allows them to see their cargo’s location in real-time throughout the cold chain.

Equipment-wise, the line says its StarCare Controlled Atmosphere containers offer optimum control of oxygen and carbon dioxide levels to slow the ripening of fruit such as bananas and pineapples, while its Innovative Quest II high-speed cooling technology ensures less energy consumption by its reefer boxes, which will still arrive at the optimum temperatures.

Meanwhile, CMA CGM launched its own CLIMACTIVE solution for the transportation of highly sensitive fruits and vegetables this summer, using active controlled atmosphere technology supplied by cooling technology giant Daikin. The company describes CLIMACTIVE as the latest and most advanced solution for maintaining sensitive commodities’ freshness to market by faster reducing temperature and regulating oxygen and carbon dioxide levels.

Earlier this year CMA CGM also introduced REEFLEX, a system for the transportation of liquid products such as fruit juices or milk in a single bag stowed within a 40-foot reefer container.

Fellow liner giant MSC also reported that it carried 1.4m TEUs of chilled and frozen cargo in 2017, using its fleet of PrimeLINE containers built by Carrier Transcold. The carrier says it provides regular and frequent monitoring of shipments, from receipt of a loaded container to final delivery, and that its reefer boxes are fitted with a software programme to display specific alarm codes should a malfunction de detected.

Cold Chain Links

Ports likewise need to provide warehousing facilities capable of storing a variety of commodities under different conditions, as well as facilitating the interconnectivity of data between other actors along the cold chain.

A good example of a state-of-the-art new cold warehouse is the facility which opened at the Port of Tilbury outside London in May. Belonging to NFT, the UK’s market leader in temperature controlled logistics, the 230,000 square foot space claims to be Europe’s largest cold store that is ‘port-centric’ – meaning its port location reduces the delivery time and amount of truck miles/emissions involved compared to inland storage and distribution sites.

Handling both reefer container and conventional breakbulk reefer vessels, and targeting cargoes from all the different ports around London, it operates 24/7 to ensure products get from the arriving vessel to retailer faster, thus increasing shelf life.

NFT says that an important competitive factor is that its business model enables “the temperature profile and labour resource in the different chilled chambers on offer can be flexed to match the produce seasonality and retailer demand. This provides a highly versatile and cost-effective supply chain solution.’

With heightened demand for perishables globally, more reefer containers are also being purchased by shipping lines. This leads to rising demand for more services on dock.

Global terminal operator, PSA, has recently launched a new product, COOLSphere, to provide services to ensure that the integrity of crucial parameters of cold chain cargo are always maintained. These services focus on temperature, atmosphere and power management during the transfers between vessels and the container yard, as well as during the dwell period of the reefer containers in the port. COOLSphere will be rolled out progressively across PSA’s terminal network, starting with its flagship operations in Singapore.

Such services assure that power supply cut-offs to reefer containers do not extend beyond a set-time limit (e.g. within 30-60mins). With longer distance of travel, or during intermodal shifts between sea, air or rail, generator sets will be mounted onto reefer containers during transportation to ensure cold chain integrity through an uninterrupted power supply.

Using Automated Reefer Monitoring Systems (ARMS), PSA offers flexibility by ensuring that temperatures remain at, or are set at defined levels stated by the customer throughout the reefer containers’ dwell stays in the port. Real time monitoring via ARMS also ensures that each reefer container adheres to defined atmosphere levels (of carbon dioxide, oxygen and nitrogen levels) that are set by the customer. This process helps to hasten or retard the ripening process of the perishables, and ensures customers that their cargo will reach the market in optimal condition.

The Cold Chain Future

According to analysts Dynamar there were a total of 574 conventional reefer ships with combined capacity of 183 million cubic feet in operation as of July 1 2018, plus just 16 ships of 6.6 million cubic feet on order.

Assuming only modest newbuilding continues and ships are scrapped by the age of 30 years, that fleet will have dwindled to 400 ships of 134 million cubic feet by 2025, based on a prediction by Dynamar Reefer Analysis in 2017.

By contrast, the fleet of containerships able to carry refrigerated boxes keeps on growing, points out Dynamar, standing at 5,275 ships of 20.9 million TEUs with 2.3 million reefer plugs as of July 1 this year, with another 345 newbuilds of 2.56 million TEUs with 202,700 reefer plugs on order.

In an indication of how the market is growing, Hapag-Lloyd this summer placed an order for 11,000 more reefer containers, adding to its existing fleet of 91,000 units, with 2,000 of the new boxes “equipped with technology to slow down the ripening process”.

The German company reports it has grown its reefer container fleet by 29% since 2015, having already added 11,700 units through its acquisition of UASC and ordered another 7,700 reefer boxes last year, in response to “increasing demand from clients to transport temperature-sensitive goods.”

Fellow consultant Drewry confirms the trend. It estimates that seaborne reefer trade grew by 5% in 2017 to reach 124m tonnes, an acceleration of the 3.6% growth seen over the previous decade, with containerised reefer traffic growing at a much faster rate (+8%) than conventional reefer vessels.

Drewry predicts that container shipping lines will have captured an 85% share of the seaborne reefer market by 2021, compared to their 79% share in 2016.

The trend was echoed at the 4th Cool Logistics Asia 2018 event in Hong Kong this September where representatives from different links in the cold chain gathered. There they heard that for example Asia’s refrigerated goods traffic is booming, with China predicted to overtake the US as the world’s largest fresh fruit importer by 2025.

CEO of Japanese liner consortium ONE, Jeremy Nixon, noted that several ‘telematics’ initiatives were now underway at container lines, who were following the lead of pioneer line Maersk in this respect. Technologies such as data analytics and perhaps ultimately Artificial Intelligence and machine learning could be used to improve the overall supply chain, he said, particularly with high-value goods such as those transported in reefer containers.

These trends place increasing onus on container lines to have sufficient supply of refrigerated containers; on ports to have the necessary reefer plugs and refrigerated warehouses to receive these boxes and their unloaded cargoes; and on the landside supply chain to have the necessary means to ensure collection and delivery under the same temperature-controlled conditions.

All in all, today’s growing volumes and diversity of foodstuffs and temperature-sensitive pharma products are continuous drivers of innovation all along the cold chain.