The rise of mail-order food shopping means more suppliers are shipping meat to customers. While convenient, it is also risky.
As a perishable product that attracts rapid bacterial growth, meats must be kept colder than 40° F.
This is the case for all meats, from beef and poultry to lamb and pork, as well as processed meat products like burgers, ham and sausages. Some meats need to be kept at a refrigerated temperature, while others require freezing conditions.
This presents challenges for meat suppliers as they need to be certain their product will remain at the necessary temperature throughout the entire shipping duration. If it doesn’t, the meat will spoil and could be dangerous to consume.
Best Practices for Shipping Meat
Meat suppliers have a range of options for transporting their products, from meat shipping boxes to meat shipping containers. Using appropriate packaging for meat products isn’t the only consideration though. Here, we’ll go through this and other best practices for shipping meat.
1. Use effective insulated packaging
The best meat packaging boxes for shipping are insulated meat boxes. These provide a protective barrier against ambient temperatures, allowing you to maintain the required temperature inside the insulated meat boxes for the entire shipping duration.
View our recommended insulated meat packaging below.
2. Add sufficient refrigerants for additional protection
To complement the protective insulation of refrigerated and frozen meat shipping boxes, use refrigerants inside the meat shipping containers.
Cold packs and/or dry ice allows you to maintain cold temperatures for even longer periods. The quantity required to do so depends on the following:
- Meat weight
- Caliber of the insulation
- Ambient temperatures
- Shipping duration
3. Avoid longer transit durations
Many meat suppliers assume they must offer overnight shipping to safely deliver their products.
With effective insulated packaging and sufficient refrigerants, however, it is possible to protect refrigerated meats for up to 72 hours. Frozen meats, meanwhile, can be protected for up to 48 hours using appropriate insulated boxes for frozen meat packaging alongside dry ice.
Transit durations longer than these are not recommended.
Recommended Meat Shipping Box: PopupLiner
PopupLiner is an insulated box liner that can be custom-sized to fit inside any carton box. Providing both reflective and conductive insulation, IPC’s proprietary design ensures your frozen and refrigerated meat shipments are protected from ambient temperatures for up to 72 hours in-transit. It is even effective at maintaining the required temperature for cold shipping seafood.
Don’t just take our word for it though. At our in-house performance-testing facility, we can simulate the ambient conditions your product will be shipped under and provide a detailed analysis of its temperature range throughout the shipment. Based on these results, we can develop the best protocol for shipping the meats at the required temperature.
As well as providing effective thermal insulation, PopupLiner is compact and easy-to-use. The liners arrive flat in compressed bundles, ready to be unfolded and dropped into a carton. As well as saving on labor assembly, the PopupLiner is space-efficient which means lower warehouse and storage costs compared to bulky EPS coolers.
PopupLiner can also be made water-tight with the addition of a plastic liner, making them practical to use alongside cold gel packs or dry ice.
