Logistics

Write a two-page paper, plus the title page and a reference page on the following statement:

Research and find a cold chain technology that is being used to ensure safe and healthy foodstuffs within a retail business of your choice. What federal regulations must be followed to ensure such safe and healthy food in that cool supply chain?

•Written Communication: Written communication is free of errors that detract from the overall message.
•APA formatting: Resources and citations are formatted according to APA (6th edition) style and formatting.
•Length of paper: typed, double-spaced pages with no less than a two-page paper.
•Font and font size: Times New Roman, 12 point.

ANSWER

Cold Chain Technology

Cold chain techniques are a kind of supply chain that deals with the storage, transportation, and preservation of goods that requires special attention and need to be kept at a specific temperature or within a given acceptable temperature range. This mechanism evolved because of the increased need for temperature-controlled logistics to transport vast quantities of food over considerable distances effectively. Recently, however, the use of the cold chain approach has become significant in modern supply chain solutions to transport more sensitive and vital items over large distances through different climatic conditions. The paper thus investigates the type of cold chain method used in groceries stores and supermarkets to maintain safe and healthy foodstuffs.

Cold Chain Technology

Foodstuffs in both supermarket and groceries stores have one thing in common: they require refrigerated transport to get to customers unspoiled and in a usable condition. As the name suggests, the cold chain is used for goods that need refrigerated temperatures, which consumers demand. These retail businesses must maintain a transparent cold supply chain which involves preparing, storing and transporting these items from one area to the next (Tsai & Pawar, 2018). A successful cold chain ensures temperature-sensitive items are stored within optimal degree ranges and keeps the needed states from start to finish. Refrigeration is also widely used in the food supply chain, including processing, packaging, waste management and distribution of perishable items, which needs further refrigeration during storage and transportation. This technology requires catering to a longer shelf-life of the farm-fresh dairy items and other agricultural items that requires frequent certain temperature status to be kept.

Federal Regulations in Food Safety

All food businesses are needed to follow the legal needs for food safety. Groceries, supermarkets and other businesses in the food retail department are no exception. The general laws of food safety outline that every food business operating along the food chain must keep a safe food product that should be managed and maintained as needed. All groceries which generate fresh and cooked foods in-store are needed to follow similar food safety processes as restaurants and other food-venturing businesses (Beitzen-Heineke, Balta-Ozkan & Reefke, 2017). The HACCP standards are used to safeguard food from physical, biological and chemical food safety risks through using controls that stop cross-contaminations and direct contamination. Harmful substances can be introduced anywhere in the supply chain, starting from their farm production to transportation and storage.

Food safety strategies are created to safeguard food supplied by businesses from any form of unauthorized, malicious and criminal activities (Havinga, 2015). In the United States, the Federal Anti-Tampering Law makes it a federal violation to interfere with or infect consumer items or attempt intimidation to infect customer foodstuff. The retail department is at the forefront of safeguarding the consumer directly from tainted goods and other risky acts interfering with food safety. Still, the GFSI regulations for manufacturing now involves restrictions for food defence aiming to stop, secure and respond to any deliberate contamination of food by bacterial agents, chemicals and other toxins.

The FDA food safety modernization policy changes the country’s food safety system by changing the focus from responding to food-borne sickness to stopping it entirely (Rock et al., 2019). The body concluded seven significant rules to initiate FSMA, mentioning that keeping the food supply’s security is a shared duty among diverse points in the global supply chain for both animal and human food.

References

Beitzen-Heineke, E. F., Balta-Ozkan, N., & Reefke, H. (2017). The prospects of zero-packaging grocery stores to improve the social and environmental impacts of the food supply chain. Journal of Cleaner Production, 140, 1528-1541.

Havinga, T. (2015). Retail driven food safety regulation. In Food safety, market organization, trade and development (pp. 59-76). Springer, Cham.

Rock, C. M., Brassill, N., Dery, J. L., Carr, D., McLain, J. E., Bright, K. R., & Gerba, C. P. (2019). Review of water quality criteria for water reuse and risk-based implications for irrigated produce under the FDA Food Safety Modernization Act, produce safety rule. Environmental research, 172, 616-629.

Tsai, K. M., & Pawar, K. S. (2018). Special issue on next-generation cold supply chain management: Research, applications and challenges. The International Journal of Logistics Management.