Cold Transport Chain	Transit Time (Days)	Typical Shelf Life (Days)
Refrigerated truck / Cold-storage facility transloading / Air	4-5	30-35
Refrigerated truck / Cold-storage facility transloading / Maritime shipping	15-16	30-35
Source loading with Reefer / Maritime shipping	15-16	55-60

Source: adapted from APL.

Reefers and Source Loading in the Chilled Meat Cold Chain

Chilled meat represents a significant export market, particularly for countries like Australia, Canada, New Zealand and Argentina. However, those exporters are located long distances away from major consumption markets. Conventionally, meat exported to foreign markets was frozen but this implies a loss of quality. An expensive alternative is to use air transportation, which requires bringing meat from the packing plant to a cold storage facility where shipments will be brought to the "chilled" temperature range (just below freezing point; 0 to -2 Celsius) and placed into air transport containers. Maritime shipping can also be employed, but the usage of a cold storage facility to transload the meat into reefers in addition to the 15 days that the ocean journey may take on average, shaves half the expected shelf life of about a month. The advantage is that this alternative is much cheaper.

By source loading the cargo directly at the packing plant into a reefer conveys a notable time advantage in terms of the extension of the shelf life by about 25 days. This is the outcome of the elimination of intermediary stages in handling the cargo, leading to potential breaks in the integrity of the transport cold chain. So, the advantages of an expanded shelf life are combined with the cost effectiveness of maritime shipping with a net gain of about 10 days of shelf life.