Why a Perishable eCommerce COO Joined Coldcart

By Dara Chapman

If there’s one thing I know about perishable shipping, it’s that there’s no worse outcome than hot fish delivered to a customer’s doorstep.

This was an outcome I tried (and mostly succeeded) in avoiding on a daily basis in my role as the COO of a premium D2C seafood company. Avoiding spoiled shipments isn’t an easy thing to do when you’ve shipped as many packages of fish as I have. Performing well in that area can make or break a company, both financially and in reputation.

So how do you avoid shipping warm and gross fish to your customer? It is a complicated dance.

You must take all variables for each shipment into consideration – transit time, fulfillment centers available, carrier options, coolant, shipping box size, product being shipped, transit temperature, etc.

And then take the cost of all those items into consideration to create the perfect recipe for a perishable shipment. It is a balance between the overall unit economics of the business and the customer experience. The right answer also changes every time, on every shipment.

Developing reliable systems to successfully manage perishable shipping took years of trial and error. So how did we do it?

I remember in the early days purchasing a CSV file of 10 years of previous weather data, to give me the average high temperatures per month over the last 10 years for every zip code in the United States. Spreadsheets like that were tied together with duct tape to pull in enough data to be successful in broad strokes. But, those spreadsheets broke, required tedious effort, and weren’t usable without intensive training.

Over time, we improved our systems and processes – with the help of our incredible CTO and tech team (a luxury I hope you’re fortunate to have!). We reduced manual work, created BI tools, and brought in goodies like real-time weather data into our systems.

But throughout that journey, significant manual work still needed to be done at all levels of the operation.

What did that manual work look like across the organization?

• Excessive management hours: At various times in our evolution, it could take days to obtain data from different sources, and long hours of analysis to pinpoint exactly where breakdowns in the system were happening. Then once the data was cleaned and understood, the management team would need to meet to agree on and adjust the shipping strategies for carriers and coolant usage.

• Intensive exception handling: Have a customer that lives out in the boonies whose shipments are always delayed a day, or notice that orders flowing through PA have been getting stuck at a carrier hub for the last few weeks? Exceptions that needed to be made to the overarching shipping strategy had to be handled manually by someone on the team, to ensure every order was updated to a new coolant or carrier strategy.

When shipping perishables, every decision has a cost attached to it.

Every failed shipment is a financial loss and a poor customer experience.

Every exception that needs manual intervention invites more errors and introduces new inefficiencies.

As painful as it may have been, every detail, analysis, and workaround mattered.

Building better systems was a multi-year process – and required spending money to save money.

I'm extremely proud of the work we did to avoid shipping hot and spoiled fish to our customers. But, I’d be lying to say we didn’t wish we had access to a system that did it all for us from the beginning.

This is why I joined Coldcart…

…to make sure every brand and manufacturer has the full suite of tools needed to create and execute the recipe for a perfect shipment – every time, right out of the box, and all in one system. Several things impressed me about Coldcart’s platform:

• Unparalleled flexibility: Users can easily set maximum days in transit, adjust coolant amounts based on real-time weather conditions, and fine tune numerous other variables.

• Automated exception handling: This goes down to the level of specific regions, carriers, SKUs, and even individual customers. The customization options are endless and the UI is intuitive.

• Out of the box reporting dashboards: Any time you want, you can see the full realtime picture of how your shipments are performing and trending.

• Visibility into the unit economics of every shipment: All-in cost is always visible, and can be easily analyzed and adjusted to see the results of any new shipping model that is created.

• Easy access to a nationwide network of top 3PLs and carriers: They are all pre-integrated into Coldcart and ready to engage.

• Decision support and analytics: Coldcart evaluates your current and prospective locations across the U.S., while dynamically updating transit times – all using your actual shipping data. Complex network decisions can be made quickly and transparently.

These are just the highlights. And the platform is evolving every day. Coldcart is built for continuous innovation, ensuring that brands stay ahead of evolving challenges in perishable shipping with cutting-edge tools and insights.

If you’re a perishable brand looking to optimize your shipping strategy, Coldcart is the solution you’ve been waiting for. I’m thrilled to be part of a team that is transforming the industry, and I can’t wait to watch Coldcart help more brands achieve seamless, cost-effective perishable shipping.