Freezing produce allows us to preserve food from the moment it's prepared to the point it's consumed. The freezing process allows us to delay the decomposition of food preventing most bacterial growth. This makes it much easier to transport food over great distances and giving us the freedom of cuisine choice we all enjoy today.

Frozen goods are transported in large custom made container vehicles, these can carry very large loads equating to several tons of produce and often in excess of £100,000 in value. Any deviation in temperature can have serious consequences to the quality and safety of the produce being transported. To prevent this from occurring or to give warnings of potential spoilt food there are various monitoring solutions that provide the store or restaurant owner with proof and confidence the produce they receive has been transported within safe parameters.

A datalogger is a very low-cost and effective solution; only slightly larger than a standard USB memory stick they can record approximately 16,000 environmental events. All you need to do is place the datalogger in the area you wish to monitor, when finished connect it to your PC via its built-in USB plug. (No need to mess with any cables) The datalogger will then download all the environmental data to your PC via a simple windows based application, which allows you to view all the data in numerical and graphical form.

If a PC is not available at point of delivery, the Sequoia SM100 is the perfect low-cost (under £30) solution. It's a very simple graphical datalogger that can sit in the transportation area and record the temperature at minute, hour or daily intervals (total 100 recordings). The user can remove the device and simply see the readings displayed on its built-in LCD screen. Also the device has an audible alert should the temperature rise above a certain level for more than 2 hours. Notifying any members of staff nearby, this device is also very useful for NHS applications that use portable freezers and cold boxes to transport organs or blood.

Another type of datalogger available is the G-series from Comet systems; designed to be installed in the driver's cabin and is powered from the vehicles cigarette lighter. The G Series range allows recorded temperature data to be printed on delivery for proof of environment during transportation of the goods. This device also Conforms to EN 12830, Class 1 and EN 13486, Class 1 for the transport of food.

If you require a more advanced system to remotely check the temperature while in transit the Comet R-series is well worth consideration. This device is battery operated and connects to a GSM modem, real time temperature and humidity data can be transmitted as a SMS alert or GPRS data if the environmental safe parameters are exceeded. The end-user or staff at head quarters can also access the sensor probes to check the system at any given point and receive the latest environmental information.

Finally the T&D RTR-51 is a very clever wireless datalogger which will collect temperature and humidity data. Then the end user can wirelessly connect to the RTR-51 and collect all the data via a handheld device to view there and then or at a later point download to a PC. This device is great for anyone with a distribution system or delivers to franchises.

We hope from reading this you'll see there really is no reason why you should leave such a valuable part of your business unprotected. With these systems you could save your business from a very costly incident.