Meeting the challenges posed by refrigerated pet food

While shopping for pet food recently, I noticed something that stopped me in my tracks: an entire aisle of refrigerated pet food – something more traditionally found in the dairy section of a grocery store than a pet store.

Fresh-cooked meals, raw blends and gourmet recipes filled the shelves, all promising to improve my pet’s health.

Maintaining cold chain integrity

Demand for fresh pet food is clearly booming, but what does this mean for the supply chain? Unlike kibble and canned food, refrigerated pet food requires cold storage, temperature-controlled transport and careful handling.

This shift is reshaping logistics, from expanding cold storage to rethinking last-mile delivery.

The perishable nature of refrigerated pet food introduces unique challenges that warehouses and logistics providers must address to ensure cold chain integrity. These include:

Optimizing inbound and outbound processing times

Unlike dry pet food, refrigerated products can’t sit on a receiving dock for any length of time without compromising their quality. The moment a shipment arrives, it’s a race against time to offload, reconcile and move products into the appropriate temperature- controlled storage as quickly as possible.

On the outbound side, orders must be accurately picked, staged in temperature-controlled areas and loaded onto refrigerated trucks without unnecessary dwell time.

Temperature sensitivity

Refrigerated pet food must be stored and transported within strict temperature ranges, often between 32 °F and 40 °F for fresh products.

Even brief exposure to improper conditions can accelerate spoilage, degrade nutritional value or create food safety risks. This requires precise temperature monitoring at every stage.

Food safety and cross-contamination risks

Fresh and raw pet food can introduce risks of bacterial contamination if not handled properly.

Strict sanitation protocols, including designated storage zones, separate processing equipment and frequent cleaning procedures, are essential to prevent cross-contamination between products.

Potential recalls and traceability

Food safety requirements are tighter than ever. If a recall occurs due to contamination, improper storage or supplier issues, warehouses must be able to quickly trace affected batches and remove them from distribution.

This requires robust tracking systems, such as batch/lot control within a warehouse management system (WMS) or transport management system (TMS), to pinpoint where specific products were stored, processed and shipped.

Regulatory compliance and oversight

In the US, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regulates pet food under the Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA), imposing strict requirements on storage, handling and transportation.

Warehouses and logistics providers must maintain proper documentation, ensure compliance with temperature controls and conduct regular audits.

Last-mile delivery

This part of the process requires careful route planning and real-time temperature monitoring to ensure products remain within the correct range until they reach their final destination.

Any deviation can lead to spoilage, loss of product and dissatisfied customers, making efficiency and precision critical at every step.

Leveraging technology

As refrigerated pet food continues to gain traction, supply chains must evolve to handle these challenges seamlessly. The right technology plays a key role in enabling companies to meet growing consumer demand while maintaining the highest standards of food safety and quality.

Integrating WMS, TMS and wireless temperature and humidity monitoring systems can help to streamline cold chain logistics and ensure safe, efficient delivery. Here’s the how and why:

Warehouse management

A WMS coordinates scheduling, ensuring accurate arrival times, and leverages Advanced Shipping Notices (ASNs) so that teams know the contents of each truck before it arrives.

This enables dock door pre-assignment, speeding up the put away of items into refrigerated storage. On the outbound side, orders are staged in temperature-appropriate zones, minimizing the time products spend outside their required conditions before being loaded onto trucks.

Additionally, a WMS supports advanced inventory control including batch/lot control, and dynamic route planning.

Thanks to end-to-end tracking and visibility, a WMS makes it easier for companies to comply with regulations and handle recalls. For even greater supply chain efficiency, the WMS can be seamlessly integrated with other third-party applications, like a TMS.

Transport management

Streamlined warehouse and transportation operations are especially critical for cold storage in transportation, which is why it is beneficial to integrate the WMS with a TMS.

By synchronizing order fulfillment with transportation planning, businesses can reduce costs, optimize routing and ensure on-time, temperature- controlled deliveries.

In the case of optimized route planning, real-time data is used to identify the most efficient routes, avoiding traffic and reducing mileage. This helps reduce fuel costs and delivery times.

Thanks to the visibility provided by the TMS, operational staff are made aware of any delays on the delivery side, empowering them to proactively address issues as they arise – such as by preparing for and minimizing any temperature/humidity fluctuations, touches or time outside of the ideal zone.

A TMS can also help with load optimization and regulatory documentation.

To fully support the transportation of fresh pet food, a TMS can be integrated with wireless temperature and humidity monitoring systems.

Temperature and humidity monitoring

Wireless temperature and humidity monitoring systems are designed to ensure food is stored, transported and delivered under optimal conditions.

They run on wireless Internet of Things (IoT) sensors that continuously monitor temperature and humidity levels.

A cloud analytics console provides real-time monitoring and analytics on any device. To prevent spoilage, the system sends instant alerts via email, SMS or phone whenever measurements exceed configured thresholds.

Most temperature and humidity monitoring systems are easily expandable to cover multiple locations.

Thanks to downloadable reports and history logs, they help to ensure regulatory compliance.

Transforming a cold chain

Maintaining the safety and quality of fresh pet food throughout storage and transportation requires a seamless blend of infrastructure, technology and strategic partnerships, as this example of a national pet food distributor shows.

When it decided to introduce refrigerated pet food stock-keeping units (SKUs), it quickly realized that keeping the product at the right temperature required a complete shift in how it managed its supply chain.

The first challenge was internal. It needed to install a cooler within its distribution center, but figuring out the best location wasn’t straightforward. Space constraints, workflow efficiency and cost considerations all had to be factored in.

Placing the cooler in the wrong spot could create inefficiencies in both inbound receiving and outbound order processing, slowing down operations and increasing labor costs.

After carefully analyzing product flows and warehouse constraints, Alpine Supply Chain Solutions helped the company to determine the optimal placement.

This minimized travel time for employees while ensuring that inventory could move seamlessly from receiving to storage to outbound staging.

Upgrading the carrier network

But infrastructure changes were only part of the equation.

The distributor soon realized that the existing transportation network wasn’t equipped to handle the new temperature-sensitive products.

Refrigerated trailers (reefers) were needed, but the company’s current mix of smaller carriers didn’t have the capacity to support this shift in every operational region.

Therefore, in some cases, the distributor had to shift from smaller, local carriers to larger regional or national providers with the right reefer capacity and route coverage.

This underscores an important lesson: adding refrigerated pet food to your distribution network requires upgrading internal systems and processes, and evaluating partnerships across the entire supply chain to ensure every link is equipped to handle temperature-sensitive products efficiently and reliably.

It’s a challenge, but one that can be tackled with the right expertise.