Thermal reusable packaging for supermarket to deliver chilled

Wageningen UR Food & Biobased Research helped PostNL develop their own form of thermal packaging. Supermarkets can use this box made of hard polystyrene to deliver all their customers? groceries without cooled transport. PostNL and online supermarket Vershuys.com are using the packaging for the home delivery service they started this spring in Limburg. With the new, reusable thermal box, the quality and freshness of products are maintained, and deliveries are cost-efficient and low-energy. Food & Biobased Research, which has a lot of knowledge about the quality, shelf life and packaging of fresh foods, did research on the best materials for thermal packaging. The researchers also developed a model that can calculate how fast the temperature goes up in the packaging when it contains various product combinations, and how the temperature is distributed in the packet. These temperature changes can be used to ascertain how many cool elements the packet needs to contain, where they should be placed, and the maximum length of time the transportation can take. For the efficiently insulating box of hard polystyrene, and at an ambient temperature of 20 degrees Celsius, this could be up to 12 hours. After delivery, PostNL returns the packaging for reuse. More information: eelke.westra@wur.nl SourceWageningen World, 2014, nr. 3 ?