The Case — Transportation of Frozen Vegetables From Shanghai To Moscow

Transportation of perishable goods from China is a relevant service today, which implies delivery of cargoes with maintaining a special temperature regime. ATC offers an effective solution for air delivery of such cargoes from any part of China to Moscow. Temperature requirements may be specified for many types of cargoes, such as medicines, food, and other chemical goods. The temperature regime requires maintaining a certain temperature at all stages of transportation: from picking up the cargo from the shipper to receiving it at a temporary storage warehouse in Moscow. To maintain the temperature, the cargo is collected from the shipper by special vehicles, at warehouses it is placed in freezers, and its air transportation performed in a thermocontainer with refrigeration elements.

Thus, at the beginning of December ATC specialists organized delivery of frozen vegetables samples for the Russian client X5. Yulia Stolbova, Senior Air Transportation Manager, tells about the peculiarities of such transportation:

We had the non-trivial task of delivering frozen vegetable samples from the shipper’s door to the airport in Moscow, where the recipient would pick up the cargo himself. We could not use dry ice as a refrigerant because it is a hazardous cargo, and this fact imposes restrictions on the choice of air route and the ability to ensure the cargo handling at the airport of departure. Therefore we have opted for special foam thermoboxes with cooling plates with gel refrigerant inserted from the inside on 6 sides.

Such thermoboxes are custom made in several variants of standard sizes. A cardboard box is inserted inside with minimal gaps and the goods are loaded into it.

We picked up the shipper’s package from the manufacturer’s warehouse in a special refrigerated container. We repacked the cargo into thermoboxes and put them into the freezer at the warehouse in Shanghai airport. It is worth mentioning that while the net weight of frozen vegetables was 20 kilograms, the total gross weight of the shipment was 89 kilograms. This significantly increased the delivery budget for the customer, but allowed us to ensure the temperature conditions. We sent the cargo by Aeroflot Shanghai-Sheremetyevo direct passenger flight. On such flights the temperature in the cargo compartment is maintained at the same level as in the passenger cabin, which means that it was possible to keep the cargo frozen only by using special packaging.

Upon arrival at Sheremetyevo, the shipment was placed in a freezer at the Moscow-Cargo terminal.