Cooling Solutions for Cold Chains

Cold chains consist of several components, typically including at least pre-cooling, cold storage, and refrigerated transport.

Within most countries, it is common to find at least three different types of fresh food value chains, involving cold chain components to a smaller or larger degree. These include individual producers, who sell surpluses on the local market; groups of producers producing for domestic markets, who may combine their products and pay for cooling for highly valued products; and export marketers, who produce for overseas markets and must follow international standards for packing, cooling and shipping.

For temperature-sensitive medicines such as vaccines, the main components of the cold chain comprise cold storage and refrigerated transport.

This document discusses technical cold chain solutions as well as policy and business models to provide low-cost, low-to-no energy solutions for agricultural and medical cold chains.