Ensuring Safe Home Food Delivery
During the current coronavirus outbreak, many of us are reviewing our shopping habits. Online purchasing can be a good way to avoid unnecessary personal contact. But what about chilled or frozen food?
How can we be sure that delivered supplies are kept at the right temperature, and stay safe to eat throughout their journey to our homes or offices? Some folks are even waiting longer before handling any food delivery, making storage conditions even more important.
Timestrip temperature indicators are available for producers and retailers to verify correct food transport conditions, reassuring the end customer that all is well.
Having a clearly visible indicator also helps encourage good operating procedures. When the boxes are opened, consumers can see if food has been kept at a safe temperature. If a temperature breach occurs, you can see a colour change from white to blue in the TTI window.
Here are a few companies that have adopted Timestrip solutions for safe food delivery:
Choicelunch delivers fresh lunch food and used Timestrip PLUS smart indicators applied to the
inside of each cool box so they have a simple, highly accurate and clearly visible readout showing
how long the contents have been above the critical chilled threshold.
Choicelunch (and the State Health Inspectors) love the tamper-proof integrity of the Timestrip PLUS indicators.
From Home With Love provides hundreds of home cooks across the USA with the packaging
necessary to send home cooked frozen meals to loved ones away at college, on work assignment or
on military service. They are including Timestrip PLUS Food indicators to reassure recipients that their lovingly prepared meals were stored below 5°C (40°F) while in transit.
Leading fruit and vegetable wholesaler Oliver Kay Produce has adopted Timestrip technology to help customers comply with temperature guidelines for fresh produce. Oliver Kay began placing Timestrip indicators on its crates to indicate clearly where the temperature breaches were
occurring, enabling them to show customers that they were not storing produce correctly.
It stopped complaints for problems over which we had no control and also enabled customers to improve shelf-life and quality of produce at their own locations.
Chris O’Connor, MD at Oliver Kay.
Ready-to-cook dinner packages
A couple of years ago, a study into delivery of ‘home meal kits’ by Rutgers-Tennessee State University suggested that nearly 47% of 684 items researchers ordered arrived with surface temperatures above 40°F (5°C), rendering them unsafe to consume.
Surface temperatures varied significantly among products in the same shipment, and even on different locations on the same product. Timestrip has developed low-cost time and temperature indicators (TTIs) that can be placed inside meal delivery boxes to monitor the internal temperature.
When the boxes are opened, consumers can see if a temperature breach has occurred, shown by a colour change from white to blue in the TTI window. Each Timestrip TTI includes a serial code to ensure batch traceability, and Timestrip indicators can be kept and/or recorded as proof of a temperature breach.
Stock & Custom Home Meal & Food Delivery Solutions
Timestrip designed and manufactures a line of low-cost time and temperature indicators (TTIs) that can be placed inside the food delivery boxes to monitor the internal temperature. Custom products can be manufactured to meet a range of compliance temperatures used in the food industry.
