What You Will Need

You will need a few simple items to turn your blade from dull trash to a razor sharp tool.

1. A whetstone

2. A dull knife

3. A leather cloth

Step 5: Dry the knife with a leather cloth. start from the back of the blade, and pull towards the edge. This helps to polish the blade as well as increase sharpness

Food is a necessity without which we would starve. Without grocery stores, restaurants, and other food services, we wouldn’t be able to get it. However, these businesses don’t just get their products from thin air. Food transportation and processing are vital to the industry, and without them the entire system would collapse.

Food processing consists of everything that occurs from when food is harvest- ed up until it’s loaded onto a truck to be shipped out. This involves cleaning, sorting, packaging, and other processes that are so often overlooked. During processing, companies ensure that your food is and will be safe throughout the rest of its journey, because once it’s out of their hands, it’s no longer in their control. Transportation involves getting food from point A to point B as quickly, safely, and affordably as possible. Without efficient transport systems in place, food can spoil easily. That’s why it’s imperative that people recognize the importance of the food transportation industry.

Before food is transported, it must be packaged and processed. If food isn’t properly secured before it goes off on its way,there’s no knowing what might happen to it. While there are many ways in which food can be packaged, critical differences between them help companies to determine their applicability.

Professor Keshavan Niranjan of the University of Reading, a public university in England, said, “[Plastic] is a great material to store food and, in fact, plastics have helped us reduce food wastage.”

You can’t have one packaging for all kinds of foods. It’s a kind of horses for courses. But, if you want a generic solution, then plastics tend to give the longest shelf life.

- Professor Niranjan

Companies across all industries are always looking for ways to cut costs. However, doing so often comes at an environmental cost as well. Due to their lack of biodegradability and impact on animal welfare, Professor Niranjan is confident that “it’s not desirable to have plastics in the food chain.” Moving away from this environmentally unsustainable plastic packaging is ideal, but it’s going to be a challenge. Professor Niranjan stated, “There are what companies call biodegradable materials and compostable materials… However, such materials are not fully functional yet and they don’t have many applications,” and, “As of now, these materials are more or less in the infancy of development and I’m hoping that these materials will become functional and much better in due course.”

After the food is ready to go, it’s free to be shipped out on its merry way. Depending on that food’s target location, there are major changes in how transportation companies organize, quantify, and time their shipments.

When offering services to large businesses such as HEB, the power is in the customer’s hands. Russell Diez-Canseco, CEO of Vital Farms, said, “For most of the big grocery stores, we go to the grocery chain and we say, here are some eggs we have, and here is why we think you should carry them in your stores, would you like them? They say, okay, we’d like to put them in our stores, and then we say… we can deliver directly to your warehouse, or if you prefer, we can sell it to a distributor that you’ve already worked with.”

Due to their large volume of sales and items, it’s much easier for large busi- nesses to convince transport companies to carry products they want.

On the other hand, restaurants don’t have the same influence over these transport companies. Diez-Canseco stated, “What’s different about restaurants is because each of those little restaurants is so small I can’t go to the restaurant, ask them if they want our eggs, they say yes, and then I say how do you want us to get them to you, and they say well my distributor is Sysco. They don’t have any pull with Sysco… unless they’re McDonald’s, to force Sysco to bring our eggs to them.”

Individual restaurants don’t conduct enough business on their own to force distributors like Sysco to carry certain products. As a result, it isn’t easy for restaurants to just add something new to their menu or change the ingredients that they’re using.

Weather and climate also has a massive effect on what foods different companies can and cannot transport. “The nature of chemical reaction is that at lower temperatures, chemi- cal reactions generally take place much more slowly,” said Professor Niranjan, “At higher temperatures, they take place much faster. And therefore, the tendency to degrade is generally higher at higher temperatures.”

Degraded food isn’t safe for consumption, so companies must be very careful to ensure that their products are transported at the correct temperature. “The USDA says the eggs must always be stored and transported in an environment that is below 45 degrees Fahrenheit,” said Diez-Canseco. Quality control isn’t the only reason close moni-

We can make it work better if we could do a better job of planning their routes so that they could be more efficient and they could make sure to always fill up their trucks before they drove back to the warehouse. We could help train their drivers so that they treated our farmers well.

- Russell Diez-Canseco

toring of the temperature is important, legal trouble isn’t out of the question if they fail to comply with correct procedures.

Transportation companies have many special ways in which they deal with the temperature issue. According to DW Distribution CEO and Frozen Logistics board member Nathan Potter, Frozen Logistics “made the decision to invest in [their] own dry ice machine. So [they’re] manufacturing dry ice on site, which turns out to be a huge competitive advantage. And not only on cost, but also on service.”

Having dry ice readily available is a great way to keep food cold.

However, controlling the temperature isn’t the only factor that helps keep food fresh. “You’ve got to make it windy in your cooler so that the eggs get more and more cold air exposure, so that they aren’t creating pockets of warm air around them that keep them from cooling down,” explained Diez-Canseco.

Without regulating cold air flow to reach each and every item that is being carried, air can concentrate in certain areas, leaving some of the food to grow warmer and warmer.

As proven by household pantries, food can spoil if it isn’t eaten within a certain period of time. Every day your food stays in transport is a day that it could have spent on grocery store shelves or at your house. Diez-Canseco said, “I took three or four days to get it to them. They could take up to a week in the warehouse, and now it’s going to a grocery store. Now the egg is on the shelf, it’s now 11 or 12 days old, and it says so on the carton, by the way, this was packed 12 days ago. And now they have 18 more days to sell it. After that, they have to throw it away.” Businesses have strict deadlines as to when they want their food, otherwise they won’t be able to sell it to a customer with a reasonable lifetime left.

Similar to temperature, the government has regulations on time until consumption that can cost transportation companies big if they don’t follow them. According to Diez-Canseco, it’s also a challenge because laws differ between states, so depending on where they’re shipping to the timeline can vary: “The federal requirement is your sell-by date can be no longer than 45 days from the day you put them in the carton. But some states have more restrictive requirements. Arizona, up until recently, had 24 nology are in a powerful position to influence prices in their favor. days. California has 30 days. Texas has 45 days.”

The food transport industry differs from other transport industries because the supply of vehicles is much more limited. Potter stated, “Frozen Logistics can pick and choose who they want to partner with, and really can seek and develop long term customer relationships, because if there’s 25 people that need your services, but you’ve only got to pick three, you’re going to pick the three that are going to be the best fit in terms of customers on a long term standpoint.”

There’s only a certain number of trucks which utilize cooling equipment suited to transport food, so companies with that tech-

At the end of the day, the goal of processing and transport is to make the lives of consumers easier. Diez-Canseco puts it best: “Perishable items, what we’re all trying to do is make sure that the shopper at the grocery store gets the freshest, highest quality food that they can find.” The next time you reach into your refrigerator or the grocery store shelves, think about all the amazing things that occur to get that food into your hands.