Shipping temperature-sensitive goods like food and medicines requires meticulous planning and packaging. Many shippers turn to chamber testing as a means to validate their packaging strategies, but this approach often falls short of reflecting the real challenges that shipments face during transit. In this blog post, we'll explore the limitations of relying solely on chamber tests and emphasize the critical role that real-world data plays in developing effective coolant strategies for small parcel shipments.
When a chamber test is run, boxes are:
This is great for ensuring a shipment can perform in a very precise scenario, but it doesn’t reflect the real world.
Below we show a typical test performed by a packaging supplier. The cooler broke threshold at 60 hours with an average ambient temperature of 80F.
It looks like the shipper received some good news…with this single data point, they can now confidently say their packout held temperature comfortably beyond the 2-day journey.
However, these results don’t hold up in the real-world. Using Keep it Cool’s single-use temperature loggers, we can collect data on hundreds of real-world shipments that underwent the chaotic conditions described above. Below, you can see a graph of the temperature at delivery for shipments that had the same packout and average ambient temperatures as the chamber test above. The only difference was that these were live shipments to real customers.
In the above bar chart, we saw a sample size of 96 shipments that faced an average ambient temperature of 80F-matching the conditions of our chamber test. Of those 96, 14 of them arrived at or above threshold temp of 41F.
If this shipper had relied on this chamber test alone, ~15% of shipments would have arrived at an unsafe food temperature; leading to unsatisfied customers churning or requiring a refund/reship.
Chamber tests remain valuable for controlled comparisons and single-variable assessments. For example, if you want to compare two identical shipments with different types of insulation. However, they must be used as a complementary tool rather than the sole determinant of coolant strategies. Relying solely on chamber tests can lead to unrealistic expectations and inadequate packaging strategies.
Want to see how your packaging performs in the real world? Set up a demo using link below and we will walk you through deploying sensors in your shipments and how to develop a coolant strategy that accounts for the real-world factors at play.