The cold chain, and the part you do not control
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Three handovers, each a risk
Your cold room to your vehicle, your vehicle to their cabinet, their cabinet to a customer’s kitchen. Each one has a gap where temperature rises, and the product remembers all of them. A date printed on the assumption of perfect handling is a date that will sometimes be wrong.
Which is why the date should be conservative
Establish shelf life at a realistic holding temperature rather than at your best one, and leave margin for handling you cannot see. The cost of a shorter date is some wastage; the cost of a longer one is a customer who opened something unpleasant.
Delivery is part of production
Insulated transport, the shortest practical route, and deliveries timed so product goes straight into a cabinet rather than sitting on a loading area. For a small maker this usually means delivering yourself for longer than is convenient, because it is the part of the chain most easily lost.
Ask about the retailer’s cabinet
A stockist whose chilled cabinet runs warm will shorten your product’s life and the complaint will come back to you. This is an awkward question and it is a reasonable one, and a serious retailer will have an answer.
Record the temperature at the point it left you
It is the last moment you have evidence, and it is what separates a problem that was yours from one that happened downstream. Without it, every complaint is yours by default.
A data logger in a case costs very little
Sending one with a delivery occasionally tells you what actually happens on the journey, which is otherwise entirely invisible. It is the cheapest way to find out whether a route, a vehicle or a stockist is the problem, and it converts an argument into a measurement.