The gap is the loading bay: the few minutes and the few metres where a pallet sits between two controlled environments and belongs to neither.
What we look for first
- Dock seal condition, and whether the trailer actually meets it
- How long doors stand open during a typical load, measured rather than estimated
- Whether the vehicle is pre-cooled before loading starts, or cooled with the product inside it
- Staging area temperature, which is often ambient and rarely logged
- Who owns the handover — in practice, not on the org chart
A monitored room and a monitored truck can still average out to an unmonitored cold chain.
The fix is rarely a bigger machine. It is a dock shelter, a pre-cool step written into the loading procedure, and a logger that treats the bay as part of the chain rather than as a corridor. None of that is expensive. All of it is easy to leave out of a specification, because no single trade owns it.
