Cold shipping might be the next industry that batteries disrupt

Re:Cold shipping might be the next industry that batteries d... by millgrove on Monday July 08, 2024 @11:12AM (#40906129)

A private equity firm once asked the consulting firm I worked at to do a due diligence of a cold chain logistics company. It was ~5 years ago so perhaps things have changed, but some interesting tidbits:

+ Makes sense that this startup is starting with medical applications -- vaccines going bad because of poor refrigeration is a well-studied problem

+ I recall one cold-chain company being well known for its back-up battery because medical products are often stopped in customs, and the boxes cannot be plugged in. So you want boxes that have backup batteries that can remain unplugged for a few days while going through customs checks

+ High end seafood is another big application -- the company we were looking at started transporting lobster before moving upmarket

At the time there was a PE blitz to get into cold chain -- it had a lot of factors that they look for -- high margin, recession proof (at least the medical applications), etc.

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Re:Cold shipping might be the next industry that batteries d... by anonymouse008 on Monday July 08, 2024 @12:36PM (#40906884)

I have good relationships with seafood and food distributors though have never thought battery powered cooling packing made sense here. What exactly am I missing? Even in vaccines this is a solved problem with fewer points of failure if you just add telemetry.

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Re:Cold shipping might be the next industry that batteries d... by gumby on Monday July 08, 2024 @02:19PM (#40907836)

> Even in vaccines this is a solved problem with fewer points of failure if you just add telemetry.

It's not a solved problem, and in fact it's a serious problem, pretty much anywhere outside the OECD.

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Re:Cold shipping might be the next industry that batteries d... by gumby on Monday July 08, 2024 @02:21PM (#40907865)

> I recall one cold-chain company being well known for its back-up battery because medical products are often stopped in customs, and the boxes cannot be plugged in.

This is very interesting. Is there not a problem with battery-powered devices operating in a cargo plane? The whole point of batteries is that they have a lot of energy in them, which is why they get hot while operating and sometimes simply catch fire. I thought there were a lot of restrictions on transporting them.

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