From small delivery trucks to heavy-duty trucks, refrigerated vans cruise our streets and highways. Colourful promotional tags bedeck the smaller mobile vehicles. As for the mammoth road barges, they’re the ‘reefers’ that carry perishable goods to market. Still, regardless of size disparity, they’ve been fused with one common feature. Check it out, this squat cooling mechanism. It’s busily keeping every spoilable item cool and fresh.

A Cool and Fresh Mobile Cargo

Where do those smaller vans live? Look, there’s one parked in front of a flower shop. On the next street over, a small food delivery company is using a refrigerated container van to temperature-control the sealed storage compartment behind a driver cabin. It’s been customized, equipped with a number of wire-reinforced storage racks. Keeping all of this cool, a refrigeration unit rumbles away on the van roof. It’s sucking filtered air in, cooling the spoilable produce, and ensuring the perishable goods retain their frosty countenance. Finally, augmenting that chilled mobile environment, the foam-injected polyurethane insulation inside the van panelling absolutely assures dispatch-to-arrival freshness.

Chasing Refrigerated Trucks

This is the big business end of the perishable goods transporting sector. Again, there’s an expensive commodity in the back, perhaps food or a temperature-sensitive pharmaceuticals cargo. But that’s where the similarities end, for this massive freezer on wheels requires rawer cooling power than a small delivery van can provide. Powered by a diesel generator, the integrated cooling equipment inside a ‘Reefer’ is built to expel voluminous quantities of chilled air. That frosty discharge is then channeled throughout the elongated truck container by a bank of beefy fans. If the refrigerated truck company is kind enough, maybe they’ll let us look inside the rear container. Pull the sealed door open, look at the T-shaped decking, the insulated walls, and appreciate the potency of what’s called the cold chain.

This vehicle isn’t acting alone. No, it’s part of a nationwide fleet. At night, when the driver heads for bed, the truck buzzes away as its powerplant electrically maintains containment chill. Alternatively, there are intermodal containment parks. This is a secure area, a concrete stand where reefers rest. Electrical ports are installed in each parking place so that the refrigerated containers can be hooked up for the night. That’s the key to the cold chain, a transportation network that uses distribution hubs to govern the tougher elements of this logistically challenging operation. Meanwhile, after the intermodal phase has concluded, the flower delivery vans, meat and produce conveyance vehicles, and all other perishable good dispatching services complete that cold chain.