When the cold chain breaks, two separate accounts open. The regulatory one comes from food law: the Food Hygiene Regulation requires the operator to maintain the cold chain and keep records of it (Article 7), and not to hold product at temperatures that create a health risk or break the chain (Article 18). The commercial one comes from the buyer: a buyer who measures on receipt rejects on the same delivery, and returns or a contract penalty can follow.
A broken cold chain opens the regulatory record and the commercial account at the same time.
The sequence at the time of the event is as follows.
- Label the affected lot and separate it physically; until a decision is made this is the cheapest action.
- Export the logger data without clearing it and note door openings and device position.
- Match loading, transfer and delivery times to the lot number.
- Have the food safety lead decide against the product's own temperature limit; a brief peak in load-space air is not the product core temperature.
The regulatory outcome depends on the state of the product more than on the excursion itself. Under Article 22 of Law No. 5996, an operator who assesses that a product does not meet food-safety requirements must start withdrawal at once, inform the Ministry and, where needed, ask consumers to return it; keeping records up to date and producing them on request is a duty in the same article. Article 40 sets administrative fines for breaches, and imprisonment plus a judicial fine where food endangers people's health; amounts are revalued every year.
The record decides here. An unrecorded excursion does not count as one that did not happen; it simply cannot be defended: an inspection asks for the product's history, and without records the product cannot be shown to be sound. The same record settles on the commercial side who receives the invoice; the break may have happened in the warehouse, at loading, on the road or in the store, and telling these apart takes a measurement and signature at every handover.
