You will certainly risk arrest if you wander around with a loaded gun, but approaching a defenceless customer with a defrosted and refrozen ice cream is almost as dangerous. The food poisoning delivered by a slug of refrozen ice cream in the stomach can be just as lethal as a bullet.
But by installing a cheap data-logger in the back of a food delivery truck, people assume they’ve nailed down the chances of that happening to them. Look on the web you will see lots of firms selling these systems. In fact you’ve simply bought yourself a way to ensure that you will probably be the first to know what havoc you have on your hands.
How? Well, when your truck goes back to base, it downloads automatically by radio into a database, right? So you then look at the record of what’s been going on that day and it tells you that you had a chiller interruption and you delivered a load of refrozen food earlier that day.
Nice to have a record for your court appearance I suppose… but I’d actually sooner stop that happening in the first place, personally! That way, you know your delivery has turned dangerous BEFORE you poison someone. Not afterwards.
Ah, you say, but my trucks always keep the food right in spec. Well, my own research has discovered that after a load leaves the food factory it could be out of spec within ten minutes. We have a trial going on at the moment with a potential order for 30 units, for a food distribution company with small ‘transit size’ vans. The chillers on those don’t have an engine to power the chiller like bigger trucks do.
So when the engine is off the chiller is off. And when the driver stops for a quick smoke or a drink, he turns the engine off and locks up. C’mon, we all know it happens! Without the chiller running the load can heat up very quickly. Then the driver jumps in again, starts up, the chiller kicks in and off we go with the load chilling and soon back at the prescribed temperature.
At the next delivery the people who receive the goods just have an inferred thermometer which they point to one of the boxes inside and it’s ok. Because it’s blasted with cold air the surface can rapidly be correct even though the internal core temperature is – or was – too high.
Result – everyone’s happy until the end-customer is poisoned.
Another classic example is hospital food distribution, where much of it is made in central kitchens and then distributed around by trucks in the mornings, in insulated containers.
They have data loggers in these containers, but once again, by the time you look at your data that night or the next day, it’s absolutely no good knowing tonight that the food you served at lunchtime was ruined. Retrospective knowledge has its place, but not here!
So the clever way is to put in a system where the data is live and coming in continually. Surprisingly to some people, the product that does that is not necessary more expensive than a useless retrospective – but remember that you will need a simcard so I’d allow around £7.00 a month to run it.
And I don’t know about you, but I’d probably pay a couple of pounds a week to avoid going to prison for mass poisoning. I mean, have you seen the food they serve in there?
Derek Richardson is International Sales Director for The IMC Group, manufacturers of iSense
