October 2021 / ISSUE 141 PRINT POST APPROVAL NUMBER PP 727272/60606 FREE

Fixing the weak links in Australia’s food cold chain

Ripe for a change

Skills WORKSHOPUnderstanding cooling tower access

TALENT ON TAPThe fine art of beer refrigeration

10 | HVAC&R Nation | www.airah.org.au/nation | October 2021

We know that refrigeration keeps food fresh and healthy. But did you know it can play a starring role in addressing big-picture problems like hunger and climate change too?

According to Mark Mitchell, Managing Director of Supercool and Chair of the Australian Food Cold Chain Council (AFCC), nearly half the food grown in Australia is wasted before it reaches consumers. If the total food waste in Australia was placed in semi-trailers and parked in a line, it would stretch from Sydney to Perth (3,935km).

Every year Australia wastes more than 7.6 million tonnes of food at a cost to the economy of $36.6 billion (see infographic). That’s enough to fill the MCG nine times. The natural resources used to grow the food are wasted too. At current rates, we are wasting around 284L of water per person, per day.

To make matters worse, this food waste is being generated at a time when many people are going without. In 2019, Foodbank estimated one in five people in Australia had experienced food insecurity in the previous 12 months. In 2020, the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on livelihoods led to an average 47 per cent increase in demand for food relief, with an estimated one in three or one in four Australians going hungry.

Food waste also contributes to around 3–4 per cent of Australia’s annual greenhouse gas emissions. The warming planet means the cold chain is more essential than ever, but that same cold chain is exacerbating the cause of climate change both through emissions within the chain and the emissions generated as food waste decays in landfills.

Research by the International Institute of Refrigeration estimates an improved global cold chain could reduce its CO2 emissions by 50 per cent, and avoid 55 per cent of the food losses worldwide attributable to the current cold chain. In Australia, the main opportunities for emissions reductions are in preventing waste at each stage of the journey from farm to table. This opportunity is being recognised in policies and programs such as the Victorian government’s Path to Half strategy, which aims to halve food waste by 2030.

CHALLENGES OF THE AUSTRALIAN COLD CHAINUnlike developing nations, where the problem is a lack of cold chain assets and transport, in Australia, the problem is that the cold chain is not managing its challenges as well as it could.

To improve it and reduce waste, Mitchell says the structure of the cold chain needs to be the focus. It needs to be clearly understood as a quality management system (QMS).

That means the principles of a QMS apply, for example, ensuring there is verification at each step of the cold chain process – known as control points – so that quality can be verified at the end. As food passes through each control point, hygiene, temperature, quality, origin and traceability all need to be verified.

The cold chain includes assets where information around temperature and hygiene is easily known, for example a cold room or a fridge. In general, the control points involving refrigeration events include on-farm or manufacturer storage, pre-chilling, freezing cool-down, and when products are within a refrigerated asset.

But it is the points in between – what Mitchell terms the “critical control points” – where conditions are unknown or uncertain. The critical control points for most cold chain operations in Australia include loading and unloading, changes of custody, changes of ownership, transport and some storage.

“A compliant cold chain can reduce loss and wastage dramatically,” Mitchell says.

There are also challenges posed by geography. The cold chain is long and extends for significant distances across our vast continent. In addition, Australia generally has high ambient temperatures, and we have a small population that is being supplied with cross-continental produce. Darwin eats produce from Tasmania, Sydney eats produce from Perth, and Alice Springs eats produce from everywhere.

Feature

If the total food waste in

Australia was placed in

semi-trailers and parked

in a line, it would stretch

from Sydney to Perth

RIPE FOR A CHANGEDeficiencies in our cold chain see millions of tonnes of food go to waste,

even before it reaches the shopping bags of consumers. But as Willow Aliento discovers, refrigeration promises some solutions.

Feature

12 | HVAC&R Nation | www.airah.org.au/nation | October 2021

Each load of produce shipped from east to west, north to south or vice versa passes through multiple critical control points.

While the third-party logistics provider environment serves us well in terms of physically shipping food from A to B, Mitchell insists our transport system needs a QMS.

“The whole cold chain from paddock to supermarket is broken in Australia,” Mitchell says. He notes that fixing it starts with ensuring temperatures are verified between receivers within the cold chain and on delivery.

“We need to close the gaps, and we need better recognition of the value of [the cold chain] the QMS. We need more training of staff on the ground, too, on how to handle temperature-controlled perishables.”

GETTING IT RIGHT AT THE STARTSome food is wasted before it even leaves the farm gate; others are well organised. Stop Food Waste Australia CEO Mark Barthel says the dairy industry is one of the most efficient in terms of preserving the quality of its output, largely due to the high on-farm hygiene standards and a significant amount of on-farm chilling capacity.

For other food products, lack of chilling equipment to bring fresh produce down to an appropriate core temperature can be a major issue.

As well as increasing on-farm infrastructure to reduce waste, Barthel says more work needs to be done on improving the equipment in the seafood sector, particularly the smaller boats. While the big trawlers and factory ships have substantial onboard chilling equipment, many smaller trawlers are still relying on ice or dry ice.

There is also a significant amount of “variability” in the cooling capability in the meat sector. Lamb is particularly prone to wastage because it has a high pH and is therefore more subject to microbial growth than beef or veal.

Humidity also plays a role. You may have noticed that Australian apples are available all year round, even though they are only harvested in the cooler months. The industry has invested in appropriate cold storage and, Barthel says, is very proficient at optimising humidity for storing the fruit.

“It is similar for citrus,” he says. “They have a really good system.”

But when fresh fruit is trucked over long distances, things can go wrong. Mangos from Katherine, for example, travel through an average of 14 different logistics legs before they appear in the baskets of a Melbourne shopper, 3,400km away.

“The more you handle the produce, the more there is propensity for it to incur damage,” Barthel says.

He believes the cold chain needs to introduce more accountability, including documenting the chain of custody, and monitoring temperature, humidity and ethylene levels, so there is clear visibility of where problems occur. For temperature monitoring, thermometers must be able to measure core temperature rather than surface temperature.

The Australian Food Cold Chain Council (AFCCC) is developing a best-practice code and training, and Barthel says this is a step in the right direction.

One of the most crucial skills the AFCCC training is supporting is how to measure temperature correctly and how to ensure you have purchased the right thermometer for the job.

“You can’t just go out and buy 100 thermometers from Bunnings for this,” Mitchell says.

“The basic principles of thermal control and temperature control need to be across the workforce.”

That includes ensuring retailers and wholesalers have the appropriate knowledge. Mitchell says many of the managers in supermarkets, warehouses and in logistics have not yet had training in measuring and verifying temperature. There is also a shortage of workers for cold chain storage and cold chain transport, and a need for knowledge transfer about cold chain requirements across to the broader logistics workforce.

Mitchell says part of the solution is “training, training and more training”.

He also outlines a best practice process that includes designated temperature verification points. When goods pass through a critical control point and a party hands items over, they also hand over the temperature data. The receiver then checks the temperature is compliant by verifying it.

“Verification validates quality,” Mitchell says. “So, we need to put in a process, and that requires the use of technology.”

SMALL DETAILS, BIG IMPACTLoading practices can also be improved. For example, mixing ethylene-sensitive fruit with a high ethylene-emitting fruit like bananas is not ideal. Barthel says it can result in the sensitive produce losing up to half its shelf life, just in transit.

Truck width is another consideration. Australian trucks tend to have a 2.5m load width, whereas in Europe and the US the new, low-emissions trucks are 2.6m load width. That extra 10cm allows cold air to circulate more freely around produce on a standard-sized pallet, and circulating cold air means the load stays cooler and temperatures are more consistent across the load.

“It is a fine balance between optimal loading space and temperature, humidity and ethylene,” Barthel says.

Ideally, the Australian logistics industry will move to the new low-emissions trucks now rolling out in the EU and USA. This could have another benefit in that currently, it is not uncommon for Australian drivers to turn off the refrigeration unit to save on fuel. If the truck is parked for a break during a 40°C day, the load soon heats up.

Loading bays need attention too.

“I look at a lot of facilities and wonder what they were thinking,” says Mitchell.

Loading docks need to be temperature controlled and also ergonomically designed to ensure perishable food products can be moved quickly, safely and efficiently from refrigerated transport to refrigerated cool room.

“The National Construction Code sets very rigorous insulation requirements for commercial and retail premises – but there is no regulated requirement for insulation standards for trucks or cool rooms,” Barthel says.

WHAT IS THE COLD CHAIN?

The cold chain refers to a temperature-controlled supply chain of separate refrigeration events. The primary goal is to maintain the appropriate temperature for food products in an uninterrupted series of temperature-controlled assets that store and transport perishable products from producers and manufacturers to wholesalers, retailers, hospitality and consumers.

“The cold chain in Australia is by default a solution provider to reduce loss and waste of food,” says Mark Mitchell, Chair of the Australian Food Cold Chain Council (AFCCC). ■

FIAL (2021) National Food Waste Strategy Feasibility Study

Feature

October 2021 | www.airah.org.au/nation | HVAC&R Nation | 13

Loading docks have no standards in this regard either, although some fresh food vendors have taken the initiative by incorporating a virtual airlock on the back dock that prevents a short, sharp temperature change when produce is unloaded. Others use plastic louvres to slow down the loss of cool air.

HOW FRIDGIES CAN FIGHT FOOD WASTEThe key thing a fridgie can do to help reduce loss and waste is to take the initiative to do temperature checks of docks, cool rooms and other parts of the cold chain they work in.

Sam Oakden, Voluntary Commitment Manager at Stop Food Waste Australia, says a “good operator” has the ability to have a “significant impact” in fighting food waste. He has seen first-hand loading docks that were poorly designed, but “incredibly well-managed”.

Timing is part of the equation. If a truck door is open for 20 minutes, the goods inside will start to reach ambient temperature. Unloading needs to be efficient. Cool room doors also need to be well managed.

Some truck doors and food retail premises have alarms installed that raise an alert if temperature parameters are being exceeded.

“But this only works if someone pays attention to them,” Oakden says. ‘If someone switches them off (for example because the noise becomes annoying), all the effort is wasted.”

Useful new technology is coming onto the market for the cold chain. Escavox, for example, is an Australian company providing cost-effective, innovative equipment that delivers a real-time data stream via the cloud tracking the location of a load, temperature and humidity. It feeds data to both a GIS and GPS and a unit is about the size of a deck of cards.

The units have been trialled with products including mangos, avocados and meat, and resulted in reduced spoilage. It just shows – information is a power to fight food waste!

There also needs to be some consideration to who ends up holding ownership of wasted produce. In the EU, accountability for quality is held by each party that holds produce at each point in the cold chain. In Australia, it is the purchaser who owns the produce the moment it leaves the farm gate.

“If we get the cold chain nailed better it would mean producers could be making better income both from the local market and from export,” Barthel says.

“The cold chain plays a critical part in delivery of food to Australians and for export. If we can recognise the weaknesses and involve industry in fixing them, and also recognise how the huge distances put pressure on the cold chain, we can reduce waste.”

Mitchell says the refrigeration mechanics of the world need to continue to be good tradespeople and keep refrigeration systems running efficiently. Australia’s fridgies generally understand the principles of cold chain well.

“But there’s a lot going on before and after the fridge,” he says.

Refrigeration systems and control points, whether they are a storage asset or a transport asset, have to work to maintain quality when loading and unloading.

There are also technologies the Australian cold chain could adopt to improve control-point verification and support a QMS. Mitchell says the latest trucks out of Europe and the US feature intelligent controllers and use data loggers. There are RFID tags that change colour if the temperature parameters are exceeded, and temperature controllers in trucks with sensors that provide real-time alarms when a “temperature abuse event” occurs. There are thermometers that connect to an API so all data is cloud-hosted and the worker can “throw away the clipboard” and use a data logger instead.

“A lot of it is turnkey on the asset,” says Mitchell. “There are systems using telematics and data as part of a data ecosystem. Many of these trucks have more data coming from them than was involved in the Apollo 11 moon landing.”

The big obstacle in Australia, he says, is under-utilisation of these advances.

In Europe and parts of the US these technologies help the cold chain comply with the mandatory requirement for continuous, real-time temperature logging for perishables.

“It has been law in Europe for 15 years now,” Mitchell says. “In Australia, by contrast, we are still at the stage of preparing a voluntary code of practice, let alone having regulatory support which other economies have clearly identified as being necessary.”

Mitchell says that given the Australian cold chain is so dynamic, long, hot and fast, it would be logical to expect there would be some legislation to ensure continuous temperature monitoring for our valuable perishables.

“Maybe we make it compulsory to follow the voluntary code of practice,” Mitchell says. ■

FOOD LOST IN THE

COLD CHAINIn 2018, more than 23 million tonnes of foodstuffs worth $42 billion based on farm gate values passed through the Australian cold chain.

According to the report, A Study of Food Waste in the Cold Food Chain and Opportunities for Improvement by the Expert Group, $3.8 billion of fresh food is wasted annually in the cold chain at farm gate values, comprising:

■ 25 per cent (nearly 2 million tonnes) of annual production of fruit and vegetables, worth $3 billion

■ 3.5 per cent of annual production of meat (155,000 tonnes) worth $670 million, and seafood (8,500 tonnes) worth $90 million

■ 1 per cent (90,000 tonnes) of annual dairy production valued at $70 million. ■

3%Distribution7%

Wholesaleand retail

22%Primary

producers

17%Processing andmanufacturing

51%Consumers

– including homes,hospitality and

institutions

WHERE IS FOOD LOST?

If food wastage were a country, it would be the third largest emitting country in the world.

Much of the waste is caused by failures in the cold chain.