Emergency Logistics – The Devil or the Angel of Supply Chain Management?

When the job is no longer optimisation, but damage control.

Logistics is almost always about predictability: capacity planning, inventory management, transport scheduling, cost optimisation. But what happens when every plan stops working from one moment to the next?

When a cold store's refrigeration fails and thousands of pallets of temperature-sensitive goods are at risk. When a warehouse has to be evacuated because of a fire, or a power cut shuts down critical equipment. At that point the job is no longer running the usual processes. The job is to save what can still be saved.

This is the world of emergency logistics. Every responsible company needs to prepare for it, while all of us hope we will never need it.

The devil: an incident that doesn't make an appointment

An incident is any unexpected, extraordinary event that threatens normal operations, infrastructure, products or even people's safety. It doesn't have to be a spectacular disaster: an electrical fault or a sudden refrigeration breakdown is enough.

For goods stored at ambient temperature, a few hours of downtime is a manageable inconvenience. For chilled and frozen food, the moment the cooling stops, a race against time begins. Product temperature, packaging, the volume affected and the expected length of the outage together decide how much time is left for safe intervention.

The most dangerous thing about an incident is that it is unpredictable. It doesn't arrive during office hours, it doesn't respect weekends, and it doesn't wait for decision-makers to have all the facts.

The angel: when logistics becomes damage control

In an emergency, the logistics provider's role changes. It is no longer selling warehouse space or transport; it is working to minimize losses.

Picture a cold store where the refrigeration has just failed. The engineers are hunting for the fault, but another question is just as urgent: what happens to the goods? Can the temperature be held while repairs are under way, or does the stock need to move? Where is there free chilled or frozen capacity, and how do the goods get there safely?

There is no time to spend days on these questions. Emergency logistics means a coordinated response:

• assessing the volume of goods at risk and the time available;
• finding alternative storage at the right temperature;
• mobilizing loading and transport capacity;
• organizing the transfer in line with temperature and food-safety requirements;
• keeping the affected company, the engineers and the partners continuously in the loop.

By the numbers: what does a race against time look like?

A refrigerated truck carries 33 pallets. At our site, loading or unloading one truck takes about 15 minutes, and three loading docks can work at the same time. That is 12 trucks, or nearly 400 pallets, per hour.

That is the best case: trucks arrive continuously, there is free space at the receiving end, and work can continue through the night. So loading is rarely the bottleneck. The real question is whether you can find that many refrigerated vehicles, and whether there is somewhere to take the goods. And that is largely decided before the incident happens.

Not everything can be saved – and that needs saying too

One of the most important professional and ethical questions in incident management is when goods can be saved and when they cannot. When the cold chain is broken, it is not enough to put the product back somewhere cold. The temperature history, the length of the deviation and the food-safety consequences all have to be examined.

Decisions on what happens to the product must be made by qualified, authorised specialists. Moving it quickly does not, on its own, make a potentially damaged product safe.

The goal is not to save the goods at any cost, but to do everything possible so that whatever can still be safely saved is not lost.

When competitors become allies

In the market we compete: for customers, on quality, on price. In an emergency, though, other priorities come first.

When thousands of pallets are at risk, no single provider may have enough free capacity for the whole volume. The numbers above make the point: 3,000 pallets need 91 trucks, and that much refrigerated space is rarely sitting empty in one place. What is needed, then, is the coordinated effort of several warehouses, several haulers, and, at times, companies that normally compete with each other.

The question is no longer whose capacity it is, but where, on what terms and how quickly the goods can be stored safely. This does not override competition or competition law. It simply recognizes that in extraordinary circumstances, cooperation creates value that no single player could deliver alone.

We may be competitors in the market, but we are partners in a crisis.

You only find out how prepared you are when it's too late to prepare

Identifying risks in advance is a core task of Supply Chain Management, yet preparing for incidents is often left undone. It is worth asking a few questions now, while things are calm:

• Do we have an emergency plan?
• Do we know where the alternative warehouse capacity is?
• Do we know who is authorized to make emergency decisions?
• Can we reach our key partners at night and on weekends?
• Is the data needed to move the goods safely readily available?

At Arrabona-Frigo we have worked in temperature-controlled logistics for more than two decades. We have learned that in these moments, a short decision chain is invaluable: as a family business, our decision-makers can be reached directly, without waiting for approval at multiple levels. But speed is only worth something when it comes with the right infrastructure, an experienced team and strict safety standards.

Devil or angel?

The incident is the devil. Professional emergency logistics is the angel that limits the damage. Of course, the best incident response is the one you never need: preventive maintenance, technical redundancy, backup power and continuous monitoring all reduce the risk. But it can never be reduced to zero.

When something does go wrong, the question is no longer whether we would have liked to avoid it. It is whether we can act in time, professionally and responsibly. And it matters a great deal who is standing beside us.

Arrabona-Frigo Kft. – Temperature-controlled logistics. Expertise, responsibility, partnership.