Define cold chain

A cold chain is a supply chain with a difference. A cold chain is an uninterrupted supply system that maintains the quality of products from production through to transportation, distribution, storage, and retail by using temperature-controlled environments. What Does A Cold Chain Do? An unbroken cold chain provides a safe, temperature-controlled environment for sensitive items such as fresh and frozen food produce, pharmaceutical products, biologics, chemicals, and vaccines. What exactly is a cold chain? Learn more about providing a safe environment for business assets using cold chain management. Click To Tweet The cold chain is essential for maintaining the quality of these high and low-risk perishable products and ensuring they arrive in optimal condition, fit for use or consumption. How Do Cold Chains Use IoT? IoT enhances the Instead of manually collecting data by examining data gauges, connected sensors continuously monitor every link’s environmental conditions in the cold chain. IoT-Enabled Cold Chain Benefits • IoT sensors collect real-time data on location, temperature, and humidity, optimizing both reactive and proactive monitoring. • Smart IoT ecosystems identify incidents immediately and help to mitigate any damages or delays with reactive responses. • Rich data collected from sensors provides deep analytics, which can perform an audit on each part of the chain and optimize for efficiency. • Improves predictive maintenance and cost-effectiveness: fixing proble...

What is Cold Chain? A continuous temperature-controlled supply chain that is designed to preserve the life cycle of perishable foods, drugs, chemicals and other products. By assuring consistent refrigeration through the product's passage from manufacturing, through transport and warehousing, to final delivery, the cold chain process impacts every step of the supply chain. If you plan to ship products that need to be temperature-controlled or monitored, you must consider product stability, packaging, transportation, monitoring, and temperature minimums. To address these issues, cold chain technology can include use of gel packs, dry ice, liquid nitrogen, reefers, insulated quilts, and more. Related Terms

INCREASINGLY, TEMPERATURE-CONTROLLED DRUG PRODUCTS (OTHERWISE KNOWN AS “COLD CHAIN”) are finding their way into patient therapeutic regimens. These products are largely prevalent in the specialty pharmacy space, particularly due to distinct nuances with refrigerated or room temperature handling. It is estimated that the cost associated with transportation alone will total $12.6 billion in 2016, and will continue to rise based on the anticipated growth rates of these therapies across the industry. 1 Pharmacies need to be equipped to manage the expectations of handling these products, from receipt through dispensing to the patient, as temperature excursions of therapies with such strict stability ranges could render products worthless. This would create excess waste and unanticipated spend due to the need for replacement. Definition of Cold Chain In order to understand the importance of appropriate handling, let’s use Figure 1 2 to establish several definitions surrounding commonly accepted temperature ranges from the US Pharmacopeia (USP), which not only impact the storage of medications, but also the components associated with appropriate shipping containers. Why so specific? For starters, section 16 of every FDA-approved drug monograph refers to the nomenclature established by these USP guidelines. The section allows pharmacists to readily review and understand the approved storage and handling parameters established for the product and provides a framework for decision m...

All vaccines are thermo-sensitive and need to be properly stored and distributed within an efficient cold-chain. To ensure the quality of the cold-chain in the WHO European Region, WHO/Europe supports the assessment of national cold-chain and logistics systems. These assessments highlight the management elements of the system that need improvement. These needs are being addressed both at regional and country levels through specific training workshops on the management of vaccine stock, the monitoring of storage procedures, cold-chain maintenance, equipment requirements and other topics related to vaccine and cold-chain management. Training As with the Global Training Network, WHO is developing a network of centres to train staff in cold-chain and logistics management. A training course is also being organized for Russian-speaking countries in the Region. Management Another initiative to emphasize the importance of vaccine and cold-chain management is the WHO/United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) initiative for effective vaccine store management (EVSM), which encourages countries to procure and maintain equipment and to adopt adequate management and training practices. WHO/Europe has already supported several self-assessments and external reviews, to enable countries to obtain quality certification. Equipment Finally, WHO/Europe tries to help countries identify their needs and secure provision of the required cold-chain equipment, either through national commitment or thr...

Return all expired / wasted publicly funded vaccines through the Public Health delivery service. All publicly funded vaccine returns must be accompanied by a How to monitor the vaccine fridge temperature • Record minimum, maximum and current temperatures twice daily of the refrigerator used for vaccine storage during all days the office is open • If your office is closed, arrange for a staff member to record fridge temperatures at least weekly, but preferably every 72 hours • Consider purchasing a data logger as a back up to your digital thermometer in the event of a thermometer malfunction or power outage. The digital min / max thermometer is your main temperature monitoring device even with a data logger in place. Continue to document the temperature readings from the digital min / max thermometer in the temperature logbook. • Set the data logger to record temperatures every five to 10 minutes, but no longer than every 30 minutes provided it doesn't overwrite readings prior to download. This recording frequency is most beneficial when determining vaccine stability after a temperature excursion. • Download the data logger weekly. Record the temperature readings from the digital min / max thermometer at this time in the temperature logbook. • Indicate any closure dates in the temperature logbook • Promptly report any out of range temperatures to Public Health so that vaccine stability can be determined Contact information Call the Vaccine Preventable Disease program at 905...

There are many facets to a resilient supply chain—stringent operational processes, enhanced supplier sourcing, strong company relationships and the drive to conduct business in the most ethical way possible at all times. But, when a global pandemic such as the Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) hits, even the most resilient supply chains become challenged in ways never imagined. For instance, imports at major U.S. retail container ports are expected to remain significantly below last year’s levels into the fall as the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic continues, The online grocery market stole the spotlight from brick-and-mortar stores, surging at a 23% CAGR, The consumer confidence index dropped 18.1 points in early April; March saw an 11.9-point decline, st annual State of Logistics Report produced by theCouncil of Supply Chain Management Professionals ( And, 32% of consumers surveyed in NPD Group’s Case in point: COVID-19 has been more economically damaging than a standard recession or an escalation of trade tensions, says the CSCMP report. So, what does this mean for the future of supply chains? What does this say about cold chains pre-COVID-19? Were U.S. cold food chains really underscoring honesty, consistency and accuracy, enough to at least survive a global pandemic? That’s why, for a cold food supply chain to enforce integrity, it must incorporate blockchain, traceability, visibility, safer supplier sourcing, food safety and collaboration. Companies must re-tool, regrou...