Chaîne du Froid Post-Récolte — Pré-Refroidissement & Atmosphère Contrôlée
Pré-refroidissement air pulsé, hydrocooling, vide et atmosphère contrôlée pour exportateurs fruits/légumes — réduire les pertes.
From reading to a project decision
- Who this helps
- Owners, developers and procurement teams considering Produce Post-Harvest Cold Chain — Pre-Cooling & CA Storage Guide.
- Decision supported
- Define product duty, site constraints and comparable scope before selecting equipment or requesting proposals.
- Review status
- A dated technical review is not recorded for every legacy guide. Confirm current product specifications and local requirements with the responsible specialists; no fresh review is implied.
- Free access
- Read, calculate and use checklists without an account, payment or lead submission. Requesting procurement support is optional.
Sizing, temperature and energy checklist
- Record product, packaging, incoming/target temperatures, humidity and permitted excursions from your product specification.
- Record peak stock, daily intake, dwell time, loading schedule and seasonal peaks from your own operating records.
- Confirm grid connection, usable site area, ambient conditions, water and transport interfaces.
- Use declared operating hours, load, tariff and system efficiency; preserve assumptions when comparing scenarios.
- Have the refrigeration engineer and responsible food/pharma quality lead verify the scope before equipment selection.
Destination, season & logistics checklist
A project evidence checklist, not a seasonal forecast. Complete it for each destination using dated operating records, product specifications and responsible local specialists.
- Destination & handoffs
- Record origin, destination, transport mode, loading/unloading points, planned transit and expected waiting time. Identify who monitors temperature and handles excursions at each handoff.
- Season & peak capacity
- Record actual peak months, daily intake, dispatch, dwell time and highest stock from dated records. Label forecasts separately; do not turn an annual national trade indicator into a monthly demand estimate.
- Temperature & energy duty
- Use the product's approved temperature range, incoming temperature, packaging and loading schedule. Record site ambient assumptions, door-opening frequency, power availability and tariff period for capacity and energy comparisons.
- Site & unresolved risks
- Confirm grid, water where required, vehicle access and dock interfaces. Record the evidence owner, source date and unresolved constraint; leave unknown inputs blank rather than presenting them as verified.
Related source material: FAO post-harvest handling manual for food handling context; existing distribution planning guide and site due diligence checklist. This checklist does not establish a food/pharma specification, legal approval or engineered capacity.
Reference library, not verification of every legacy claim: FAO post-harvest management · WHO pharmaceutical temperature mapping, May 2015 · Official regulatory sources. Calculators are preliminary scenarios, not engineering certification or guaranteed results.
Pre-cooling method by crop
Berries, stone fruit: forced-air (1–4 h). Leafy greens: vacuum (20–30 min). Carrots, sweetcorn: hydrocooling (10–30 min). Match method to product moisture tolerance and packaging.
Controlled-atmosphere (CA) storage
Apples, pears, kiwi: 1–3% O₂, 1–3% CO₂, 0–1 °C. Extends storage life 4–8 months vs regular air. Requires sealed rooms (≥3 minute Δp decay), N₂ generator, CO₂ scrubber.
Off-grid solar cold rooms
For farm-gate pre-cooling in emerging markets: 1–5 t capacity, solar PV + Li-ion or thermal storage, low-charge R290 or NH₃. Payback 3–5 years when displacing diesel or eliminating harvest loss.
Export chain integration
Design pre-cool, storage and reefer container loading as one flow. Delay in loading > 2 h at ambient wipes out 30–40% of pre-cool benefit. Loading dock canopies and reefer plug-in yards are cheap insurance.
Questions fréquentes
How much loss reduction does pre-cooling really deliver?
For berries and stone fruit: 12–22 percentage points fewer downgrades at retail. Payback often <2 years for exporters.
Is CA worth it for smaller volumes?
Break-even is typically 500–800 t/year per commodity. Below that, cold storage + air-freight (or shorter storage cycles) beats CA capex.
Obtenez des devis fournisseurs gratuits
Envoyez un RFQ et recevez des devis présélectionnés d'EPC frigorifiques vérifiés.
- Industry
- agriculture
- Temperature
- 0/+4 °C with humidity control
- Budget
- €1M – €15M
- Timeline
- 8–14 months
- Equipment
- Pre-cooling tunnels, controlled-atmosphere rooms, ripening chambers
Opens the RFQ builder with fields prefilled from this guide — editable before submission.
Recevoir les lectures ColdMatch
Lectures sur le froid industriel et la chaîne du froid pour les acheteurs qui préparent un projet.
Vous recevrez une synthèse des nouveaux articles, guides du Centre de connaissances et fiches technologiques pour les thèmes choisis : titres, courts résumés et liens. Aucune offre commerciale ni promotion de fournisseurs.