By Eamonn Ryan
In many food supply chains, the cold chain is treated as an invisible background process – something that “just needs to work”. Johan Ferreira, co-founder of Cold Cubed and a biologist with over four decades of experience across agriculture and retail, argues that this invisibility is precisely the problem.
© Cold Link Africa
Speaking under the broader theme of ‘decolonising the cold chain’, he explains how a lack of understanding and visibility around cold chain integrity undermines food safety, brand trust and profitability.
From fresh produce to meat, much of what moves through the cold chain is biologically active. Fresh produce is still alive and respiring, generating heat as a by-product. For example, Ferreira describes how a pallet of ripening bananas can show a 15°C difference between the fruit in the centre of the pallet and those on the outside during transport. Without visibility into such product-level temperature differences, the industry is managing blind.
Cold Cubed was born out of this frustration. Ferreira and his co-founder recognised that while engineers focused on equipment performance, few people truly understood what the product itself was experiencing. The company set out to make the cold chain “touchable” by live-streaming product temperatures rather than just monitoring refrigeration equipment. Today, their dashboards can update every 5–20 minutes, giving near real-time insight into what food products are exposed to throughout facilities and logistics.
This shift from invisible risk to visible, measurable conditions transforms how companies manage food quality. Ferreira emphasises that the value of a product – like an apple or pear exported to Europe – is only realised at the moment the customer buys it. The customer’s experience of quality feeds all the way back through the value chain. If the cold chain fails, shelf life is shortened, waste increases and brand perception suffers.
Yet making the cold chain visible has a political dimension inside organisations. According to Ferreira, CEOs love dashboards because they finally see what’s happening. Operations and engineering teams, however, often resist, as it exposes issues that were previously “their secret.” Visibility brings accountability: every event is time stamped, and everyone can see who was responsible at what time. Decolonising the cold chain, in this context, means democratising access to information and shifting power from opaque operational silos to transparent, data-driven decision-making. It’s about moving from guesswork and blame-shifting to evidence-based management that protects consumers, brands and margins.