Transportation of a frozen ingredient
Hello, hopefully I found the right forum for this. I would like some help brainstorming how we can ensure a frozen ingredient (juice concentrate) can be kept cold enough during transportation (perhaps an 8+ hour drive) from the supplier.
I found out that there had been past issues with finding carriers that would deliver to the small city that we are in for smaller shipments (a 5-gallon bucket), to the point that the supplier wanted us to sign a waiver saying we accept responsibility for these products shipping using a non-frozen carrier. Based on how I understand this is shipped, without any special packaging that I am aware of, I am NOT OK with shipping this using a non-frozen carrier; it must be shipped frozen. (There is a larger city near us, around 100,000 people, in case a carrier would be able to deliver there.) My concern is with the temperature leading to microbiological instability and/or lack of microbiological/pathogen quality assurance for food safety.
Is the solution in finding the right carrier (a frozen carrier) with a different delivery location, different packaging/cold chain solutions, or a combination?
These are ingredients that go into a few of our products at about 2-5% of each liquid formulation, which has either a citrus-based preservative or ethanol. We manufacture dietary supplements in the United States and follow 21 CFR Parts 111 and 117 with SQF and NSF GMP certifications.
Matthew
Hi Matthew, kind of a weird idea, but what if a cooler and datalogger/thermometer were to be shipped to the supplier ahead of time? There are large styrofoam coolers that a 5-gal bucket may fit in to. If these were filled with ice packs and a thermometer to record the temperature of the container during shipping you may be in a better spot. If this is something you only order once or twice a year it may be worth the hassle.
There are LTL carriers with refers capable of maintaining a frozen cold chain--switch to one of those ----easy peasy
Hi Scampi, they claim they had a difficult time finding one, and that's when they sent the waiver. I don't know how hard they looked though.
Sounds like you need to search for your own carrier and arrange pickup, rather than letting the supplier arrange. Then with it being your carrier, you could either ask that the carrier share their temperature records or provide the supplier a case of disposable 10 hour temp. recorders, such as DeltaTrak.
We had the opposite problem, something which should be refrigerated kept freezing during transit. It was a "budget" carrier (Budreck), and even when we shared the temperature records with them repeatedly they could care less and did nothing on their end.