As heatwaves become more frequent and weather patterns increasingly unpredictable, maintaining the integrity of temperature sensitive products has become a major challenge for India’s food supply chains. For the frozen food industry, even minor temperature fluctuations can impact product quality, safety, and shelf life, making climate resilience a business-critical priority. The challenge is growing as frozen food demand expands through quick commerce channels and deeper penetration into Tier-2 and Tier-3 markets. In this interview, Naresh Kapoor, Chief Supply Chain Officer at HyFun Foods, shares how rising temperatures are reshaping cold chain logistics, the role of real-time thermal monitoring, and why sustainability, efficiency, and resilience must now go hand in hand.
India’s heatwaves are no longer isolated seasonal events but recurring climate disruptions. In frozen food logistics, where product integrity depends on maintaining extremely narrow thermal thresholds, are we reaching a point where traditional reefer planning assumptions are becoming obsolete? How are supply chains being redesigned to account for prolonged exposure to 45°C-plus ambient conditions?
Absolutely. The old-fashioned reefer planning stuff was mostly done from historical seasonal patterns, like assuming those brief stretches of hot weather and the transit conditions would stay pretty predictable. But honestly, today’s situation is different, and it’s not a small difference either. Heatwaves Tariq Ahmed above 45°C are showing up more often, lasting longer, and spreading across wider areas, so the industry has to rethink its long-standing operating guesses and habits.
Frozen food supply chains are now being built with resilience in mind, not just some “average day” picture. That usually means higher-capacity refrigeration units, better thermal insulation requirements, shorter dwell times while loading or unloading, and route changes so trucks spend less time outside during the hottest daytime windows. On top of that, firms are putting money into pre-cooling facilities, backup or contingency power, and cold storage hubs that are strategically placed, essentially adding thermal buffers in the network so things don’t swing so hard when conditions go sideways.
What’s really happening is the focus is moving away from merely reacting to temperature deviations and toward proactively engineering the supply chain so it can endure severe weather extremes without damaging product quality. This is done with continuous monitoring through IoT devices, from domestic trucking setups to smart reefer containers, basically leveraging the technology end to end.
In the frozen food industry, temperature excursion is often treated as a binary issue of compliance or non-compliance. But operationally, the real challenge lies in cumulative thermal stress across multiple touchpoints. How do sophisticated frozen food supply chains today measure and manage microexcursions across warehousing, dock operations, transportation, and retail interfaces before they translate into product degradation?
Our understanding of temperature control in the industry has changed drastically over the past several years. Temperature does not significantly affect your product if you have had one large temperature excursion; however,temperature affects your products from the cumulative effects of thermal stresses across all points on the supply chain.
As a result, leading cold chains are now using continuous temperature monitoring using the Internet of Things (IoT) with sensors, data loggers, and telematics systems to have realtime visibility of products from their beginning of shipment to their final destination. In addition to monitoring the product’s temperature to determine if the product was maintained within an expected temperature range during transit, companies are also analysing the exposure of their products to certain temperatures over time and tracking how many times a truck door was opened and closed while the products were being loaded, how long products were being loaded onto the truck, and how well loading equipment is working over time. Using advanced analytics to understand when the product will be impacted by temperature violations at each point in the cold chain, whether during warehouse staging, cross-docking, transporting to the customer, or storing on the retailer’s shelf, allows the operator to take corrective action before a minor temperature violation causes a major defect in the product. The purpose is now not to be simply compliant but to be able to continuously maintain the quality of the product throughout its life.
Peak summer conditions expose the weakest link in the cold chain very quickly. From your perspective, where does the Indian frozen food ecosystem remain structurally vulnerable today: reefer fleet capability, power reliability at distribution nodes, handling discipline, multimodal connectivity, or the economics of maintaining uninterrupted cold integrity?
All of these elements have a part to play, although the issues related to handling, discipline, and cold chain integrity at transfer points appear to be the greatest vulnerabilities.
In terms of its cold chain infrastructure, India has invested significantly in storage facilities and reefer transportation capabilities. However, the maintenance of unbroken cold chain integrity necessitates consistent performance in each link of the chain. Even the most advanced reefer equipment is not able to overcome challenges posed by delays in loading and lack of proper temperature control during transfer of products.
One issue which still exists in some areas is the unreliable nature of power, and more problems arise as frozen food distribution networks become established outside of major cities. Meanwhile, the cost-effectiveness of implementing stringent temperature controls remains problematic as well.
The next level of development within the industry will require not just the growth of infrastructure but improvement in discipline, training, process standardisation, and technology adoption, among others. The transfer of frozen foods around the country is possible using the rail network and DFC corridor.
This is an abridged version of the interview published in the July edition of the Logistics Insider Magazine. To read the complete interaction, click here.
