The cold chain rule fits one sentence: a temperature-sensitive product is kept within its own condition without interruption from production to handover, and a record proves it. Reducing the rule to a single degree misleads, because the condition changes from product to product, and two products in the same vehicle may have different permitted ranges.
Why the rule is not one number
| Product | Condition | Basis |
|---|---|---|
| Quick-frozen food | -18 °C or colder at every point of the product | Turkish Food Codex Communiqué 2014/47, Article 5 |
| Minced meat | Core temperature no higher than 2 °C | Regulation on Specific Hygiene Rules for Food of Animal Origin, Article 31 |
| Fresh fish | Close to the melting point of ice | Same regulation, Article 52 |
| Cold chain medicine | +2 to +8 °C, under the conditions in the licence | TİTCK notice, 27 December 2018 |
Three legs: condition, continuity, proof. The first leg is the condition. No temperature is chosen before the product and its scope are named; the condition is read from the label, the regulation, the specification or the licence, and the measurement method comes from the same place. A probe in the body air does not show the product core, so the record states whether the reading came from air, a surface or inside the product.
The second leg is continuity. The chain rarely breaks in the warehouse or the vehicle; it breaks between them, at handovers: a pallet waiting on the dock, a lid left open, a container loaded without pre-cooling. If goods are loaded before reaching their target temperature, neither an insulated container nor a reefer body closes that gap afterwards. The short rise of up to 3 °C allowed for quick-frozen food covers only transport, distribution and retail cabinets, never storage.
The third leg is proof. At every handover the product and lot, the reading and its method, the time and place of measurement and the person who decides on an excursion are recorded under the same consignment identity. One acceptable reading at delivery says nothing about the whole route; if recording starts only after an excursion, the decision is made from memory, and memory does not pass an audit.
When an excursion happens, two decisions are kept apart: correcting the cooling and deciding what happens to the affected product. Even when the temperature is back on target, the product is not released without an assessment based on the measurement records. What to write down at the moment of a break is covered in the cold chain incident report, and how records are compared at the end of a period in the monitoring and assessment guide. The other measurement and record guides sit in the cold chain knowledge area.
