Will there be an ISO Standard for Refrigerated Parcel Deliveries?

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1/2 March 2023

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In keeping pace with the economic growth and current globalisation, the demand for refrigerated parcel delivery services is growing, both for food and pharma.

What does that mean? Without organised refrigerated parcel delivery services, manufacturers have to deliver these kinds of products on their own. But with a possibility of using high quality third party service providers, more flexibility is reached.

To guarantee a common standard for these kinds of deliveries, the British Standards Institution (bsi), Group Japan, has developed a so called PAS (Publicly Available Specification), supported by a steering group of 21 organisations from U.K., Japan, China and Taiwan, and sponsored by Yamato Holdings, a Japanese door-to-door delivery service. The latter introduced the current project at the 2017 Seoul Cold Chain Forum end of October 2017. The title of the PAS is PAS1018:2017 "Publicly Available Specification; Indirect, temperature-controlled refrigerated delivery services - land transport of refrigerated parcels with intermediate transfer".

The PAS specifies requirements for the provision and operation of indirect, temperature-controlled delivery services for chilled and frozen parcels in land transportation vehicles. It includes all delivery service stages from receipt of a chilled or frozen parcel from the delivery service user to its delivery at the designated destination, including intermediate transfer of the refrigerated parcels between refrigerated vehicles and via a geographical routing system.

Based on the PAS, the Japanese Industrial Standards Committee (JISC) recently submitted a new proposal to ISO for a common international standard. The goal is to get a standard within an international consensus that can be more easily adopted and incorporated into domestic standards and regulations. The discussion is still ongoing.