By Eamonn Ryan
Cold chain conversations often focus on compressors, evaporators and setpoints. Johan Ferreira of Cold Cubed offers a different starting point: the biology of the product. As a biologist turned cold chain innovator, he argues that you cannot manage what you don’t understand – and in the case of fresh produce, that means recognising that the product is still alive.
© Cold Link Africa
Many fresh products, particularly fruit and leafy vegetables, continue to respire after harvest. This process generates heat, which can accumulate dramatically if not managed correctly. Ferreira illustrates this with a practical example: when a pallet of bananas, covered with a protective shroud and transported from Johannesburg to Cape Town, is measured, the bananas in the centre can be 15°C warmer than those on the outside. As bananas ripen, their respiration rate – and heat generation – accelerates.
Traditional cold chain monitoring often measures air temperature or equipment status, not the actual temperature of the product itself. Cold Cubed’s approach reverses this: they place sensors in and around the product, in grid patterns throughout facilities and vehicles, to show what the product is truly experiencing. This difference is critical because microbes, ripening rates and shelf life are all driven by product temperature, not just ambient conditions.
Ferreira also highlights the importance of rapid post-harvest cooling. For something like lettuce, simply placing it in a standard 2–3°C cold room can take around eight hours for the core temperature to drop to the same level. Technologies like vacuum cooling can do this in as little as 40 minutes, dramatically extending shelf life and improving quality. Over recent decades, such improvements have turned lettuce from a product with just three days of shelf life into one that can last 11–12 days under optimal handling.
Yet these biological realities are often invisible to decision-makers, both on farms and in retail organisations. That invisibility feeds poor practices – like leaving pallets standing in the sun for hours, or relying on manual temperature logs filled in once a day, from memory. Ferreira notes that in one retail store, all temperature checks were written at 16:00 for the entire day, rendering the data meaningless.
By re-centring the conversation on living products, Cold Cubed pushes the industry to measure what matters. When product temperatures are continuously visible, stakeholders – from farm workers to DC managers to executives – can make informed decisions that extend shelf life, reduce waste, and protect consumers.