How To Ship Food And Other Perishable Items?

Once you set up your online food-selling business, a bigger challenge of shipping these items awaits you. If you want your homemade goodies traveling all over the world, then you need to ensure careful shipping. Complete awareness of all facts is a must before you reach out to courier companies and finalise your shipping strategy. To ensure the food items arrive in a safe-to-consume condition, you must be thorough with the essential tips and tricks. The packaging is only one aspect and timing is everything when selling perishable items. Read on to find out the considerations to keep in mind when shipping food items.

Use Drier Ingredients

Food items are more susceptible to rotting easily owing to the high moisture content in them. You can prevent this damage by adopting a technique to decrease the moisture content in your food items. Using drier ingredients while preparing different delicacies can help you decrease deterioration. It will help keep the products dry and fresh for extended period of time. Avoid sending over moist and sticky items, as they perish easily and quickly. A stale cake will definitely leave a bad impression on your buyer, right? In case you still wish to send moist food items, make sure they are airtight and you ship them with a minimum transit period. Vacuum packaging is a great option in this case.

How To Control Temperature During Preparation?

Baking and cooking food items at low temperatures for a prolonged period keeps them healthy and fresh. Adequately cooked food items can withstand extreme weather conditions for a certain period of time and can be shipped conveniently. However, you must ensure that the prepared food item is kept at room temperature for a while after cooking/baking. Bakers and manufacturers prefer to freeze food items like meats, processed cheese, yogurt, and other milk products after keeping them at room temperatures. This helps maintain their nutritional value. So, if you are planning to send cakes, cheesecakes, lobsters, or similar perishable items, freeze it for at least 24-hours before shipping. Thus, controlling temperature post cooking the food keeps it fresh for longer.

Packaging

Proper packaging helps retain the freshness of baked and cooked goodies. The homemade, slightly moist confectionery items should be sealed in airtight tins, and the drier ones can be packed in plastic food wraps after securing them in plastic wraps. Leak-proof freezer packs keep the contents of your package cold while being shipped. To ensure they do not leak, place them inside a zipper freezer bag as an added precaution.

For packing cookies or chocolates ensure there are no spaces left between them. If significant gaps are present in their packaging, there is a higher chance of breakage during shipping and handling. For fruits that bruise easily, wrap each piece individually with tissue paper, and use extra balled up paper to cushion the spaces in between them. Pad the outer edges and sides to avoid bumps and bruises while shipping from one location to another.

While shipping several different sized and weight items together, make sure you put the heavier and larger food items at the bottom and the smaller and lighter ones at the top. Doing so would prevent crushing them against each other. Also, ensure that these well-packaged items are labeled appropriately, too.

Use of a good secondary packaging can help secure the products from all ends while also keep them fresh for a longer period. 

Preparing For The Transit

While shipping these food delicacies, it is imperative to prepare them for the transit. Packing is the first step to make sure that you properly prepare items for transportation. You can consider choosing a shipping company that offers refrigeration of foods during the transit. This will help you keep your food packages fresh for a long time. Ship your food items at the start of the week. Doing so ensures that the process does not spoil your food items are because of delays due to the non-working weekend. You must minimize all plausible causes of delay to keep the food items fresh and doe safe delivery.

While the holidays may be the most popular time of year for perishable shipping, but if you follow these tips and tricks and prepare accordingly, you can delight your customers and folks with freshly prepared food delicacies. Additionally, shipping companies have improved their policies to meet the challenges of delivering specialty food items, meats, and other perishable products, with their robust packaging and shipping technology.

Consider Shipping Food Items Locally

Lesser the time taken for the food items and perishables to reach the customers, higher the chances for them to stay fresh. You must consider selling your food items and any other perishable items locally with the help of hyperlocal courier services. Shiprocket has launched its hyperlocal delivery services that allows sellers to ship items within 15 km from the pick up location. The best part is, the time taken for the order to be delivered will be much lesser, hence your products will stay fresh throughout.

Final Say

Shipping can be a difficult nut to crack when you are selling perishable items, but once you conduct thorough research and figure out the best ways to pack and prepare your products, you can rest assured that your shipments will reach the buyer safely. Additionally, you may get in touch with shipping aggregators like Shiprocket that maintains high safety standards when it comes to shipping items. Moreover, with Shiprocket’s hyperlocal initiative, you can reach customers in your locality and offer them with some of your amazing food items. With a great performance on all aspects of order fulfillment, Shiprocket offers cheap shipping with the best carrier partners.