Insulation Rules

Technology for the shipping of perishables is improving, but the insulated box still reigns supreme in air freight

by Peter Conway

n the shipment of perishables, air cargo has always been behind the technology curve when compared to other modes. In road or sea freight, continuous cool chains, logging of temperatures in transit, and even the use of modified atmospheres to preserve produce have long been standard. In air cargo, by contrast, many shippers still put their fish, fruit, vegetables or flowers in insulated boxes with a gel pack, and hope for the best.

The Envirotainer was originally supposed to change all that. Created in the mid-1990s by the Swedish company of that name, it offered an insulated container with a dry ice store and a thermostat-operated battery-powered fan to ensure produce was kept at a constant temperature.

The product was a success. Today Envirotainer has 3,500 containers in its global leasing pool, and dominates the market for active cooling containers.

But 80 percent of the trips its containers make are for the transport of pharmaceuticals. Only 20 percent is for food products. Martin Peter, vice president sales, admits this will probably fall to 10 percent in 2007.

"Our food customers are important to us, but we don't spend a lot of energy on finding new ones," Peter said.

Food products using Envirotainers tend to be high value niches - French and Italian cheese, for example - or supply chain emergencies. When bird flu broke out in a British poultry farm recently, McDonald's used Envirotainers to rush in supplies of chicken nuggets from South America.

For the largest share of shippers and logistics companies involved in fruit, vegetable, flower or fish shipments, the good old insulated box still rules.

"In the perishables business, people have always dreamed of a magic box that you could pack at origin, send to the airport and just forget about it, and find that at the destination it had maintained temperature and humidity levels," said Issa Baluch, chairman of Dubai-based logistics group Swift Freight International.

But no such magic box exists. It's not because high-technology containers don't work but because the basic operations and economics of air shipping heighten the problems associated with dedicated equipment.

"Envirotainers are bulky and how do you return them? For African traffic is mainly one way: four-to-one in favor of exports," Baluch said.

"They are very good containers but no one has money to pay for them," says Ricardo Gonzalez, managing director of VIAS, the commercial arm of Vitoria Airport in Spain, which is a gateway for a lot of fish shipments.

Meaning, insulated boxes still rule for fish shipments, but technology and techniques are getting more and more sophisticated. Gonzalez said the key is really the way the boxes are managed throughout the supply chain, not the air journey itself, which only lasts a few hours, and takes place in a hold that is kept at around 8 degrees Centigrade.

"What does not work is if the fish is caught, and then left on the wharf for a day before you put it in the box," he said. "But if you cool the fish as soon as possible after it is landed, and keep the box in refrigerated facilities, it can last for up to 10 days, or 15 days for fillets."

Baluch said East African shippers are making big improvements in the quality of air freighted perishables simply by blast chilling them before shipment. "Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda are all now using blast chill, because it gives their product a longer shelf life," he said.

New insulation materials are being developed all the time. Tony Wright, a former perishables manager for British Airways who now runs Exelsius, a consultancy on temperature controlled supply chains, points to Polartherm, a new material developed by a United Kingdom company Aerotrim. Flexible and light enough to be used as a cover or lining for an existing container, Polartherm provides a low-cost solution that can be tailor-made to shipper requirements. Aerotrim said its' material only loses 0.7 degrees Centigrade an hour in temperatures 20 to 25 degrees above the product temperature, without any need for dry ice or gel packs.

Helping drive these improvements is the greater use of temperature loggers, which can be put into sample boxes in a shipment and record temperatures at regular intervals, helping identify where cool chain failures occur. That, in turn, focuses shippers minds on the techniques and technologies their transport companies are using.

While loggers are not new - companies such as Sensitech and Elpro have been making them for years - advances in electronics have reduced their weight and cost. Gonzalez said some are now as small as a credit card, and increasingly are used by fish importers to check the quality of their supply chain.

Wright says the devices help meet demands from regulatory authorities on food retailers to have a full audit trail of the condition of products during transport. Loggers are also useful for the consignee when pursuing claims against transport companies.

Still, the cost of loggers could be an issue.

Juan Abel Eceverria, director logistics and development for Ecuadorian flower exporters association, Expoflores, said the $17 to $25 cost of the devices makes them too expensive for general shipments, but they can be used for particularly sensitive exports such as roses and gypsofilia.

"There are a lot of claims for these products, so investing in this kind of technology is the less expensive option," said Eceverria.

Typically, it's the importer who pays for the loggers, and often arranges for them to be inserted before the shipment gets to the transport company.

"It is not that there is a reluctance to trust loggers put in by the transport company, but let us say there is a comfort factor in using your own device," said Wright.

At the other end, the problem is finding the devices. "We put them in incognito and then can't find them again," said Christian Helms, CEO of Germany-based Cool Chain Group. "About half of our loggers are lost that way."

Envirotainer's latest container, the RKNe1, also has an integrated logger, which records ambient temperature, container temperature, battery level and door openings. On arrival, data can be uploaded into computers via infrared devices and interpreted by industry-standard software.

The RKNe1 also differs from the former Envirotainer model in that it uses an electrical condenser to keep temperatures constant and has a heater if the container gets too cold. Envirotainer has some 100 of the containers in use and faces competition from new entrants eying the lucrative pharmaceuticals market.

U.K.-based Skycooler, formed last September, offers containers to carriers, forwarders and shippers on six-month leases, rather than single-trip leases, as in the Envirotainer model.

Dayton, Ohio-based AcuTemp, whose containers are marketed by AmSafe Bridport, offers its products on leases from a month upwards.

"Airlines are moving away from the trip-lease model," said Steven Boyd, AmSafe director of sales and marketing. "There are significant issues around that model, and airlines want to have their own stock."

Graham Walters, CEO of Skycooler, said cost is an issue. "It is expensive to maintain a pool leasing system. We decided to go for a low cost model, and pass on those costs to the customer," he said.

Both companies claim their containers are more rugged and better insulated, with AcuTemp saying its Thermocor technology improves insulation three-fold at no extra weight. Both offer full logging capabilities, with Skycooler using SD cards to upload the data to customer computers.

These new entrants are just starting out, and will have to go a long way to match Envirotainer's grip on the market. But the incumbent does have one problem. Its' dry ice and battery containers do not have built-in logging capabilities.

"It would just be too big an investment to change them all over," said Envirotainer's Peter.

He believes there is still a big market for the dry ice model, which offers lower costs than containers with active heating and cooling systems.

"Pharmaceutical companies tend to want active heating and cooling in the early days, when they are doing clinical trials or do not know how sensitive their products might be," said Peter. "A few are also afraid dry ice will damage their packaging, though in fact it has no contact with the contents of the container.

"But once the product is established, the dry ice container is often a perfectly good solution. 95 percent of the time, you only need cooling, not heating," he said.

A few years ago Envirotainer patented another technology that could have significant applications for the shipment of pharmaceuticals and perishables, a device that could transmit real time information about container temperatures via satellite, yet switch off for safety reasons when it entered an aircraft.

But Envirotainer realized the technology was useless without a massive communications infrastructure and licensed it for development to other companies. Several, including DHL, are said to be considering it for non-perishable uses.

Similar products are already available for ship and truck shipments. Satamatics recently announced it was providing a service to refrigeration supplier Carrier Transicold to monitor temperature, position and other data by satellite. But Wright questions how useful the technology is for air cargo.

"If the satellite data showed there was a problem with a shipment, what would they be able to do about it?" he said. "At Envirotainer we found that it was not top of customers' lists of priorities."

Yet being able to do something about shipments in transit is exactly what one U.S. company offers to shippers of fish - mainly restaurants and wholesalers. Brandford, Conn.-based PeriShip works with FedEx to get data about customers' shipments of fish and seafood sent through the integrator's U.S. domestic system.

Using that data, and information about weather and flight delays, PeriShip ensures shipments do not miss connections, or if they do, another solution is quickly found.

"We have access to support groups in each of the main FedEx locations who can expedite a package, and get it out on the next flight," said Luciano Morra, PeriShip's president, chief executive and co-founder.

"Customers don't want to wade through tracking data from FedEx; they just want to know if there is a problem," said Morra. "And if there is a problem, they want to know that something is being done about it. FedEx does a great job even without PeriShip, but food products need a level of attention that is not possible for FedEx to give when it is moving millions of boxes a day."

This techi-focused approach enabled PeriShip to notch $4.5 million in revenue in 2006. That was aided, Morra says, by "revenue steams from our relationship with FedEx" and not from charging the customer a premium. PeriShip projects growth of 70 percent in 2007.

PeriShip also advises clients on packaging products appropriately to handle the rigors of the FedEx system.

"We were at the Boston Seafood Show in March, and we had a lot of interest. There is still a lot of market out there for us to cover," said Morra.