Ultimate Guide: How to Ship Frozen Food Safely and Effectively

As a food business owner, knowing how to safely ship frozen food is critical for your business growth. Shipping frozen food is not just packaging it in an icebox and sending it to the correct address. A lot goes on behind the scenes to make shipping frozen food a success. After all, this is a $230 billion market. To be a part of this industry, you must learn all the nuances of frozen food packaging. 

Also, you need to ensure that your frozen food ingredients are Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved. You also need to learn about the correct freezing and storing techniques. For example, when meat is suddenly cooled, water particles in them crystallize, ruining the piece and other such intricacies.

Now, let’s learn about how to ship frozen food in this blog.

Understanding the Basics of Shipping Frozen Foods

Factors affecting frozen food shipping costs

Shipping frozen foods requires more care than shipping non-perishable items, which can affect the overall cost. Some key factors that impact the cost include:

• Packaging materials: You’ll need insulated packaging, like styrofoam coolers or thermal liners, to keep the temperature controlled. The cost of these materials can add up.
• Dry ice or gel packs: These are necessary to keep the food frozen during transit. Dry ice tends to be more effective but also costs more. Gel packs work well for shorter shipping times but may not last as long.
• Shipping speed: Frozen food needs to be delivered quickly. Choosing overnight or two-day shipping will often raise the price, but it’s necessary to ensure the food stays frozen.
• Shipping distance: The farther the package has to travel, the more it will cost, especially if it requires faster shipping options to maintain the temperature.

Keeping these factors in mind helps you plan better and avoid unexpected costs.

Common challenges in frozen food delivery

Shipping frozen food is no easy task. The food can get ruined even if you skip minor details. As they say, one rotten apple can spoil the whole bunch. Similarly, even if one of the products starts melting, it will ruin the entire batch. 

The defrosted food will contaminate everything else in the frozen food shipping containers, causing massive losses and risking infecting your customers. 

Therefore, you must spend more money ensuring you have the right equipment to facilitate it. In addition, you need an excellent logistics team to make swift deliveries and reduce the chances of things getting wasted. Of course, route planner software, like Upper, comes in handy for the food delivery business. 

Here are some more common challenges faced by companies while shipping frozen foods:

1. Hot and humid conditions

Besides extreme temperatures, hot and humid environments are the major threats to the frozen food industry. Coolant materials and dry ice keep the temperature of the shipping container boxes low. To prevent cool air from escaping, you can use air pillows. Gel packs absorb humidity and keep the containers dry and the food frozen.

2. Improper packing or using incorrect packing material

Improper packaging leads to leakages that can spoil or contaminate the rest of the products in the delivery trucks. It also causes the temperature to escape the perishable packages easily and starts thawing the food products sooner than expected. If this happens, the whole thing will be messy when the customer receives the package.

3. Extremely cold temperatures 

Just like heat ruins, frozen food products, extremely cold temperatures do the same. Now, this might be a head-scratcher for some. Here’s the reason- very low temperatures prevent the necessary chemical changes from taking place that can affect the quality of your food. For example, the sudden freezing of the food products also crystallizes the water in the meat and ruins the texture.

5 Essential Steps for Shipping Frozen or Perishable Foods

Knowing how to correctly ship frozen food will help you keep it safe from getting spoilt. Here are the 5 steps you need to follow to safely ship frozen food:

1. Optimize your product packaging

The first lesson on how to ship frozen food is to pack frozen foods correctly. Having fully refrigerated transport trucks is not enough to ensure the safe delivery of frozen foods. 

Shipping frozen foods may seem easy and cost-effective during the initial years of business. 

But the cost can quickly add up as you start scaling your business. Therefore, you need to analyze how you are packaging your food shipments and the types of containers you use to ship frozen food items. 

Search for insulating packaging supplies which also weigh less, like styrofoam, to safely ship frozen foods.

For example, if you are packing smaller products in a large shipping container, you unnecessarily increase your transport expense while decreasing the space in the trucks to carry more packages. Even if you’re using a slightly big shipping box, use packing peanuts or bubble wrap to minimize friction and protect the frozen items.

2. Use thick insulated foam containers

Refrigerated trucks are the best way to ship frozen food. However, adding this modification to the trucks can be expensive. Hence, the next best option is to exclusively use insulated food containers to ship refrigerated and frozen foods.

• Remember, the better the quality of insulation, the longer your food will stay frozen. Most novice frozen food business people put smaller products into larger containers and fill them with frozen gel packs. While this does work, it reduces efficiency and wastes space. 
• As mentioned earlier, it is crucial to optimize your frozen item’s packaging. 

So, start with small containers and then cover them with insulated container paddings like styrofoam, aluminium box lines, thick plastic liner, or air pillows. 

• Repeat the process until the product is tightly secure. The goal is to prevent cold temperature losses while increasing packaging optimization. 

3. Pack with dry ice 

Dry ice is nothing but carbon dioxide (solid). It has no liquid state, so it goes directly from a solid to a gaseous state. As a result, it can cool things down while sublimating at -109.2° F. Always handle dry ice with special gloves to avoid frostbite injuries. 

When it is sublimating at such low temperatures, it brings down the temperature of the product. This is why dry ice has been used as a cooling agent for more than a decade now. Dry ice companies are also well-known for consistently shipping dry ice to food businesses. So you will not face any problem sourcing it for yourself. 

Dry ice is also used in fog machines to create smoke in concerts. In motorsport, dry ice is used to cool down the engine temperature of the cars. 

4. Always buy and ship in bulk

It is always wise to order in bulk. With the demand for frozen food compounding by 5% every year, there is no shortage of insulating materials in the market. Therefore, you can easily find suppliers with competitive prices for bulk orders. 

Furthermore, having all the materials in your storage units help optimize your warehouse and frozen and cold food packaging processes; here’s how:

• To begin with, you can increase the productivity of your workforce by enabling them to package and store hundreds of frozen food items at a time. It also makes it easier to retrieve them whenever the need arises. 
• Next, having some pre-prepared storage reduces the burden whenever you get a request for a large shipment. 
• Lastly, all these small changes bring down the cost per package and boost your ROI. 

The same is recommended while shipping perishables. Prepare a separate refrigerated storage bay where the products are kept ready just before shipment. This reduces the transfer of frozen products through different temperatures. Test this method a few times before deploying it. 

5. Ensure proper labeling 

In the greater scheme of things, labeling might not seem as important. But the correct labeling mechanisms can make or break your entire business; here’s how:

• First, labeling makes it convenient to keep track of all the packages. 
• Next, labeling also helps your customer know about the manufacture and expiry date of the frozen food items. 
• Finally, you can design labels to mark different products with different priority levels. 
• Say you mark a packet as a high priority. The delivery person will first ensure the delivery of that specific product before moving on to the next one. Essentially, it lengthens the shelf-life span of highly perishable products as customers receive them earlier. This directly translates into better customer satisfaction and higher ROI. 

Simplify Frozen Food Shipping with Upper Route Planner

Frozen food is time—and temperature-sensitive, so shipping it can be a challenge. However, entrepreneurs and business owners have adopted the correct packaging techniques to transfer such sensitive food objects. However, with inefficient route planning, even the most robustly packaged frozen foods will spoil. 

Here, the Upper cloud-based route software becomes a game changer. The route planning and scheduling feature of Upper route optimization software enables you to make quick, time-sensitive deliveries. Below, you will find more about how Upper can help you ship frozen food efficiently: 

1. Multi-stop advanced route planning 

Upper’s route optimization features choose the perfect routes for multiple deliveries. As a result, the driver spends less time on the road and delivers the frozen foods before they start to defrost. Also, making more deliveries daily means minimum transit time, low shipping costs, and high productivity and profits, thanks to route planning software for food business.

2. Set priority deliveries

This feature helps you highlight the order priority—low, medium, or high. With this information, your delivery drivers can deliver the most urgent items first, ensuring that such time-sensitive deliveries happen safely. 

3. Share ETA with customers

With Upper, you can share delivery status + ETA with your customers via automatic notifications. This will save your delivery drivers from doing back-and-forth with frozen food, which may cause some major food spoilage. 

4. Cut down your route planning time by 95% 

As a frozen food business owner, your priority is handling your core business operations and not spending time manually planning and optimizing routes for shipping service. Such time-draining activities consume your precious time, which you could have spent creating profit-boosting strategies. 

Upper understands this and cuts 95% of your planning time by automating the whole route planning and optimization process. 

5. Reduces 40% of your fuel costs

Inefficient route planning means drivers spend more time on the road than making deliveries. These are routes they could have avoided. They may also get stuck with contingencies that manual planning cannot predict. That is where Upper comes in. 

Upper helps you automate route planning and optimization, considering delivery constraints, driving preferences, time windows, and more. This helps drivers spend less time on the road, reducing fuel costs by up to 40%. 

Try the 7 days free trial today.

Conclusion

The ultimate goal is to deliver fresh food that is free of contamination. Not following the guidelines can risk the safety of your time- and temperature-sensitive frozen foods. This will not only spoil the food but also put your business’ reputation at stake. Follow the steps mentioned above to create a package capable of maintaining low temperatures and shipping frozen food safely. 

However, proper packaging alone isn’t enough to ensure that your frozen food reaches your customers safely. You must also leverage the right tools to help your delivery drivers reach your customers on time. Adding a route planner like Upper to the mix will address this and enhance the delivery experience for your customers. Try the 7 days free trial today.