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Post-Harvest

Cold Chain Management for Kenyan Horticulture Exports

2026-06-27 6 min read

Between a Naivasha greenhouse and a European auction there are at least eight handover points. Each one is an opportunity for temperature to rise.

Exporters who measure every link, rather than only the cold room, consistently record fewer claims.

Pre-cooling capacity is the usual bottleneck

Field heat must be removed quickly. Undersized pre-cooling forces staff to overload chambers, which slows cooling further and creates warm cores in pallets.

Set regimes per product and enforce them

  • Document the target temperature and humidity for each product
  • Log continuously and review the charts daily
  • Investigate every excursion with a written cause

Loading discipline protects everything upstream

A cooled pallet standing 40 minutes on a hot loading bay loses the benefit of the entire cold chain. Stage loading, use dock seals and pre-cool trucks before loading.

Use loggers to argue your case

Data loggers in the shipment turn claim disputes into factual discussions. When the excursion happened after handover, the record protects you.

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