Chilled vs Frozen Transport Temperatures: What the Rules Actually Say

Australian food law sets one number for chilled freight and none for frozen. Standard 3.2.2 of the Food Standards Code requires potentially hazardous food to be transported under temperature control, which means 5°C or below for cold food, and requires food that is intended to be frozen to remain frozen during transport. The −18°C figure most people quote is not in the Code. It comes from the Australian Cold Chain Guidelines, an industry guide published by the Australian Food and Grocery Council (AFGC).

Both matter. The law is the floor every food business has to meet. The industry guidance is what manufacturers, retailers and receivers commonly write into their product specifications, and under those guidelines it is the product's manufacturer or owner who sets its temperature limits.

What is law and what is industry guidance

So a sentence like “the law requires −18°C” is wrong, but that does not make −18°C optional in practice. If your customer's specification says never warmer than −18°C, that is the number your freight is checked against at their dock.

Typical transport temperatures by product

Not everything that travels in a refrigerated truck belongs at 0–4°C. Some tropical and subtropical produce is damaged by cold, which matters in Queensland more than most places.

The truck doesn't cool your product

The Cold Chain Guidelines are blunt on this point: transport vehicles are not designed to chill product down. They maintain the temperature the product is loaded at. A pallet that leaves your coolroom at 8°C should not be expected to reach 4°C on the road.

Two things follow. Your product has to be at temperature before it is loaded, and the vehicle has to be pre-chilled to at least the never-warmer-than temperature before the doors open. We pre-cool our trailers before loading and read product temperature with a calibrated probe at pickup, so a warm pallet is found on your dock and not at your customer's.

Where temperature is lost

• Time on the dock. The guidelines set maximum out-of-refrigeration times: 20 minutes for chilled food where the dock has no refrigeration, 20 minutes for ice cream in any environment, and 20 minutes for other frozen food at room temperature. Frozen food other than ice cream gets 60 minutes in a +5 to +15°C air-conditioned anteroom, or 90 minutes in a 0 to +5°C anteroom.
• Door openings. The guidelines say to switch the refrigeration unit off while doors are open and keep doors closed between drops. Every extra drop on a run is another opening.
• Loading above the load line. The guidelines say never to load above the load line and not to block airflow, because the air moving around the load is what carries heat away.
• The warm spot. The warmest point is usually the top of the wall nearest the door. Temperature through a load can vary by more than 5°C, particularly in older vehicles.

Queensland summers make each of these worse, because the gap between dock air and product is larger. Staging pallets in the coolroom until the truck is backed in is the cheapest fix there is.

Carrying chilled and frozen on one vehicle

Mixed loads need a physical barrier. The guidelines call for insulated partitions or a dual-temperature vehicle, with frozen product positioned nearest the evaporator. Multi-temperature units use movable bulkheads and separate evaporators to hold two, sometimes three, zones.

As a thermostat guide, the guidelines suggest −22°C for the frozen zone and +2°C for chilled on runs over two hours, or +4°C on metro runs. Chilling-sensitive produce cannot share the chilled zone: bananas at 13°C and dairy at 2°C need separate compartments. Our multi-temperature service is built for split orders, and the fleet page lists the range each vehicle class can hold.

What the receiver checks, and can refuse

Under Standard 3.2.2, chilled potentially hazardous food should arrive at 5°C or below and frozen food is accepted only if it is frozen hard. Food arriving between 5°C and 60°C can be accepted only if the transporter can demonstrate that the time and temperature were safe. Otherwise the receiver must not accept it.

FSANZ's own receiving example is a useful routine: ask to see the truck's temperature data logger, probe a sample, and record the time and temperature. A food business handling potentially hazardous food must have a thermometer accurate to ±1°C to do this.

What to do next: the records to ask for

The guidelines say each link in the chain should record three things. Ask any carrier, including us, how they capture each one:

1. 1Product temperature when the freight is received from you.
2. 2An air temperature log for the load space during the trip, and how that log is generated.
3. 3Product temperature at delivery.

We record calibrated probe readings at pickup and delivery, keep them on file and supply them with the proof of delivery on request. For the wider compliance picture, read HACCP and food safety questions for your carrier, and for the booking details a carrier needs, see how to book refrigerated transport.

Then write your set point and never-warmer-than limit on the booking, stage freight in the coolroom until the truck arrives, and request a quote with the product specification attached.