Cold chain

The single most common cold-chain error in this trade is treating a reefer as a freezer. Lemon carried below +10 °C takes chilling injury that shows as rind pitting only after the container is opened at destination. Watermelon below +10 °C loses flavour that never comes back. Tomato below +10 °C stops developing aroma compounds permanently — it will still redden, and it will still taste of nothing.

Meanwhile cherry has to be at 0 °C within two hours of picking or the stems go brown, and onion wants 65–70 % humidity where everything else in the range wants 90 %+. Our rooms and our reefer set-points follow the crop, and every product page publishes the regime we recommend.

Field heat is the enemy of shelf life and it is removed first, not last. Forced-air cooling for berries and stone fruit, hydrocooling for cherry, room cooling for citrus and the storage crops.

A lot that misses its pre-cooling window goes to the domestic market rather than into a container — the loss is smaller than the claim.

Pendingm² of cold storage, number of rooms and pre-cooling throughput are still to be supplied.