Preserving food items during transportation serves to benefit both you and your loyal customers. You'll get to save on potentially huge losses associated with food contamination and your customers are unlikely to suffer food poisoning.

Understanding the relationship between temperature and the preservation of food items that you transport is essential for the correct preservation of these food items. Here is a brief discussion on the temperature danger zone and how it might affect how you transport and handle food items.

What The Temperature Zone Is

The temperature danger zone is a range of temperature that provides a conducive environment for the rapid multiplication (and subsequent thriving) of different types of bacteria that may cause food poisoning.

This range of temperature is considered to be between 5 and 60 degrees Celsius or between 40 and 140 degrees Fahrenheit. This "dangerous" temperature range applies to many of the food items you transport and handle (e.g. milk, milk products and raw meat).

How You Can Use The Temperature Danger Zone To Your Advantage

The temperature zone is a relatively wide range of temperatures. In order to get the most out of your attempts to preserve food however, you might want to establish the exact temperature (within this range) at which you should store different food items during transportation and during storage.

For example, storing fish at 37 degrees Fahrenheit is acceptable because this temperature is below the lower limit of the temperature danger zone (40 degrees Fahrenheit). However, storing fish at a lower temperature of 32 degrees Fahrenheit will make the fish remain fresh for twice as long. You should have this in mind if you plan to transport fish over longer distances and if you want to store the delivered fish for longer.

How The Danger Zone Might Affect Food Transportation

The temperature danger zone might make it necessary for you to hire a refrigerated transport truck that's designed to offer zoned refrigeration. Zoned refrigeration is achieved by creating internal partitions in the refrigerated truck and installing an independent thermostat for each partition. This allows the partitions/zones to be set to different temperatures during transportation.

The temperature zoning feature will come in handy if you plan to transport perishable food items whose preservation temperatures are far apart. For example, you'll need to preserve sashimi at a temperature of about -4 degrees Fahrenheit or -20 degrees Celcius. If you're to transport sashimi and other types of fish that need to be preserved at 32 degrees Fahrenheit, a temperature-zoned refrigerated truck will eliminate the need to hire multiple trucks for fish transport.