Calamp

With a growing global market that includes a strong demand for fresh food, supply chain’s cold side has never been more important.  Companies want to ensure their product is fresh, as well as safe, when it reaches consumers. However, governments and organizations add another layer of complexity because they want to guarantee the same things but through regulation. For produce, fruits, seafood and other fresh-to-consumer items, the U.S. Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA), signed into law in 2011, governs how producers and shippers ensure food safety. These directives illustrate the emphasis on preventing loss, contamination and spoilage rather than merely responding to it. This shift in focus requires new solutions and processes that can provide visibility and documentation from origin to destination, and perhaps beyond. IoT technology is part of the answer because smart options provide insight into not only the location of every shipment, but its environmental conditions whether ...

  The Forefront of Cold Chain Monitoring for Vaccine Shipping Preparations for a COVID-19 vaccine rollout highlight the complex nature of vaccine shipping and the need for real-time cold chain monitoring of sensitive cargoes. How do you ship a vaccine that must be kept at freezer or even deep-freeze temperatures without ruining it? Especially when you’re shipping millions of vials across the globe to stop a pandemic? The answer: very carefully. The COVID-19 vaccines in development, like many other vaccines and pharmaceutical products, require strict environmental control. Some of the vaccines need to remain cool. Others are frozen and must stay that way. One may require an arctic temperature as low as -112 degrees F (-80 Celsius). By comparison, ice cream and steaks are shipped at -80 F. If at any point between pickup and delivery a vaccine shipment goes out of a specified temperature range, an event known as a temperature excursion, the integrity of the vaccine may be compromised,...