Cold chain: from the Ararat Valley to Dubai

Chilled fish has no margin for error. Every hour and every degree spends part of the shelf life that the retailer, not the farm, ends up paying for. This is the chain as we run it, and what to ask any supplier about theirs.

The day of harvest

Fish is taken from the pool and processed on site the same day, and it leaves on that day. Nothing is held overnight to make up a fuller shipment. That single decision is what the rest of the chain is built to protect.

Chilling and packing

Whole fish goes into polystyrene boxes with ice; fillets are vacuum packed at about 800 g per unit. Vacuum is the primary pack, not a retail decoration: it is what keeps a fillet stable through handling in transit.

Eleven kilometres to the aircraft

The farm is eleven kilometres from Zvartnots international airport. That is the least glamorous number in this article and possibly the most important one, because the trip to the aircraft is the part of the chain with the least temperature control anywhere in the world. Short is the only real mitigation.

Three hours in the air, one to two days to the distribution centre

Flights from Yerevan to Dubai run daily and take about three hours. Door to distribution centre is one to two days depending on the arrival airport and the customs clearance. For a chilled product, air is not one option among several; it is the only mode that leaves useful shelf life at the other end.

What to ask about any cold chain

These are the questions that separate a chain from a hope:

• hours from harvest to dispatch, and whether anything waits overnight
• storage temperature at each stage, and who is accountable for it
• whether temperature loggers travel in the boxes
• flight frequency, because a weekly flight makes a weekly product
• who clears customs at the arrival airport, and what happens to a delayed consignment

A supplier who cannot answer the last one has not thought about the day it goes wrong. Perishable freight sitting in customs is not a logistics problem, it is a written-off shipment.