by Customers are clamoring for locally sourced meat, seafood, dairy, and more. With website builders and e-commerce tools more accessible than ever, local farms, grocers, and meat shops have exciting new opportunities to sell their perishable foods online.
But what are perishable foods exactly? How can you improve the ways you store and ship them on a limited budget and tight resources?
In this article, we’ll cover everything you need to know, including tools and best practices you can use to level up your small farm, meat shop, or fresh seafood business.
Perishable Foods: Defined
Let’s start with the basics: what are perishable foods?
According to the USDA, perishable foods are foods that are “likely to spoil, decay, or become unsafe to consume if not kept refrigerated at 40 °F or below, or frozen at 0 °F or below.” Put simply, they’re any food item that can go bad quickly and can’t be stored at room temperature.
Some examples of common perishable foods include:
- Meat
- Seafood
- Eggs
- Poultry
- Dairy (like unsalted butter, yogurt, and cream)
- Fruits and vegetables without hard skins
- Sliced deli meats
On a practical level, if you couldn’t store it in your pantry, it’s probably perishable (which is a lot of what small farms and meat shops sell).
Challenges of Perishable Food Storage and Shipment
More consumers want locally sourced meat, dairy, and cheese. The proliferation of farm-to-fork businesses is great for communities, but managing perishable inventory as a business grows can be challenging.
Don’t let yourself fall behind on properly storing and prepping your perishable food correctly. The consequences can be dire — especially for a small business.
1. Food Safety + Regulatory Compliance
Improperly storing and shipping perishable food has a cost. Even one lapse in food safety can permanently damage customers’ trust. However, lost business from angry customers isn’t your only issue — you may also face fines for not meeting regulatory requirements.
In 2011, Congress passed the Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA) to prevent outbreaks of foodborne illnesses more effectively. In effect, the FSMA made standards for the storage and shipment of food more strict.
These rules govern storage conditions (like temperature), package materials, speed of delivery, and other similar requirements.
2. Inefficient Inventory Management
Efficient inventory management is how food sellers ensure that perishable items are sold and restocked at the right time. Unfortunately, many small businesses don’t have access to the same technology and tools that larger corporations have, making it easy to lose track of perishable stock.
3. Revenue Loss and Food Waste
38% of food in America goes to waste.
Not only is food waste bad for communities and the environment — it’s also bad for a small business’ bottom line. Without following proper perishable food best practices, many small farms, fishmongers, and meat shops stand to lose a substantial amount of money on spoiled food.
Best Practices for Storing and Shipping Perishable Food
Your reputation as a fresh food seller isn’t just based on how your food is raised, grown, or produced. Good storage and shipping processes are necessary to build customer trust and long-term success.
Here are some important best practices to follow for storing and shipping perishable food:
Storage Best Practices
Before food goes out to your customers you need to do everything you can to ensure it stays as fresh as possible. Here are some of our top tips for perishable food storage.
1. Keep the Temperature Consistent
Bacteria that cause foodborne illnesses grow in the temperature danger zone (between 40° F and 140° F). Make sure the temperature of your fridge is consistent throughout — even one warm spot can allow dangerous bacteria to grow.
You’ll also want to freeze any meat that isn’t being shipped or sold locally within a few days.
Keep the temperature of your storage area as consistent as possible. Don’t leave the door to a walk-in open when restocking inventory or prepping items for an order. Frequent fluctuations in temperature can accelerate how fast your food spoils.
This principle is true for your non-refrigerated dry storage areas, too. Maintaining consistent moisture and temperature levels in your storage environment is key for product freshness and longevity.
2. Optimize Your Inventory Management
When inventory is managed manually on paper or using a spreadsheet, it can be difficult to know which items are closest to expiring and what your current stock levels are.
This issue is compounded for small businesses that sell food online. Inefficient or inflexible inventory management can result in incorrect stock showing up on the website. Flexible inventory is also needed to create product bundles or set up subscriptions without causing confusion and chaos for you and your staff.
This is why many farms and meat sellers use farm-to-fork inventory management solutions. Using a modern inventory management solution helps farms manage perishable food by:
- Providing real-time visibility of all inventory
- Keeping track of high-risk items with batch and expiry date tracking
- Connecting in-person and e-commerce inventory for accurate inventory levels
- Providing custom reports to understand inventory movement and best-sellers
Many specialized point of sale (POS) systems include these tools, allowing you to modernize the customer experiences while improving inventory management processes.
3. Use Proper Storage Containers
Oxygen helps the bacteria that leads to food spoilage thrive. Using airtight storage containers will help you prevent bad bacteria from taking hold and stop food contamination in its tracks.
Any perishable food in your fridge should also be covered with plastic wrap or foil to prevent air exposure and odors. This is especially true for meat, fish, and poultry.
In addition to using food-safe containers, consider how you organize your stock. Make sure older inventory is more accessible and ready to ship out first. This prevents food from getting lost and spoiling in a dark corner of your fridge or warehouse.
4. Regularly Clean Out Your Refrigerator, Freezer, and Dry Storage Areas
No matter how good your storage and organization are, a little bit of mess is inevitable when dealing with food. But over time, even a small dirty spot can become a big problem.
Prevent this by making sure to regularly clean your storage areas.
For your fridges and freezers, use warm, soapy water to wash the floors, shelves, and containers. Let them fully dry before using them again. For your dry storage, wash the floors and dust any shelves.
Shipping Best Practices
Even if your inventory is spotless and well managed, it won’t matter if your food products arrive spoiled. Follow these tips to ensure your food stays fresh and your customers stay happy.
1. Use the Right Shipping Materials
Just like your perishable storage, maintaining consistent temperatures when your products ship is vital to keeping them fresh for customers.
Heat is the enemy of shipping fresh food. This is why insulated packaging is a must for selling perishable items. There are a few options for insulated containers:
- Insulated box liners
- Styrofoam containers
- Insulated pads
Any packaging you use should also be airtight to prevent contamination or temperature jumps in transit.
2. Consider Using Dry Ice or Cold Packs
Beyond keeping your food airtight and insulated, you also need to keep it cold. When shipping frozen meat or other frozen items, you’ll want to make sure the meat remains frozen from the moment it leaves your freezer to the instant it enters the customers’.
When it comes to freezing items, there are a couple of options.
- Dry ice: Dry ice has long been used to ship frozen items like meat and ice cream because it is exceptionally cold (-109° F) and does not produce liquid when it melts. However, dry ice is a hazardous substance, so there are specific requirements for packing, shipping, and labeling it.
- Cold packs + gel packs: Cold packs are bags filled with refrigerant gel, water, or other liquid. These are packed inside insulated packaging to keep items cool. We at GrazeCart generally recommend gel packs as they work great and are much easier to handle than dry ice.
Which cooling materials you use are ultimately up to you. Make sure you check on the rules for shipping perishable items, as they can vary between carriers.
3. Simplify Perishable Shipping With a Shipping Aggregator
Using a reliable shipper that can quickly deliver fresh food from your farm, meat shop, or grocery to your customers is key for food safety and customer satisfaction.
However, managing shipping logistics can turn into a nightmare as your small business grows. Shipping aggregators that specialize in perishable items like ShipFare can remove some of that complexity by letting you manage shipments and local deliveries together.
Using an e-commerce platform that integrates with shipping services like ShipFare can also save you money since they get preferred rates from carriers.
Easily Manage Perishable Food With a Leading E-commerce Solution
If you’re building an online meat, farm, or grocery business or expanding an existing one, having the right tools can ensure your perishable food storage and shipment runs smoothly.
Leveraging software solutions like GrazeCart, built specifically to meet the challenges of perishable inventory, can help your business thrive. GrazeCart provides:
- Advanced inventory tracking and management tools
- Integrated e-commerce capabilities and a user-friendly website builder
- Sell-by-weight functionality
- Built-in customer loyalty and mix and match pricing
…and more.
Set yourself up for success with a trusted partner in perishable food sales and management.
Schedule your free 14-day trial today.