If a small dairy delivers from the boot of its own car, nothing looks wrong at the first three stops. By the fourth the whey has separated from the yoghurt and the vacuum pack of cheese has sweated on the inside. A frozen plastic bottle tucked in between is an unmeasured cold source: it freezes the product it touches, does nothing thirty centimetres away and has thawed completely by the afternoon.
Milk, yoghurt and cheese do not share the same storage condition. Take each product's labelled condition and the supplier's instructions as the basis, and separate a mixed load with compartments or separate deliveries.
Moving the cold out of the vehicle and into the container is often a better fit than tying up capital in a refrigerated vehicle used a few hours a day. GEBHARDT's Isotec TBX runs on pre-frozen eutectic plates and keeps the cold chain for up to 24 hours. For fresh goods the container is pre-cooled for 12-20 hours to 0 to +2 °C; the -3 °C melting-point plate sits close to the chilled range and is frozen at -8 °C. A plate is reused for years, and the one precondition is being able to freeze it in your own store.
Four pieces of information decide container size and plate count: the core temperature of the product at the last stop on the hottest day of the year, measured before the vehicle is unloaded, the departure time, the number of stops and the arrival time at the last stop. Door openings and the temperature profile along the route can be recorded with the 4smartlogistics solution; with those figures we work out the plate count together with GEBHARDT's thermal specialists.
