How the Global Cold Chain Affects Your Life

We live in an incredible era — and sometimes, we take it for granted. We're not talking about the Information Age, but the Refrigeration Age. Like automobiles and household electricity, we've only had access to refrigeration in our homes for a little over 100 years. Your great-grandmother probably had an icebox that relied on regular ice deliveries. She didn't have a refrigerator.
But you do! And today, the team at Interstate Cold Storage is here to explain how the global cold chain affects your life every day. We'll cover frozen foods, local foods, and other uses for the global cold chain. Enjoy.

The Global Cold Chain Allows us to Eat Well.

As Americans, we take for granted access to a tremendous variety of food all year long. Your freezer and refrigerator are stocked with cold and frozen foods from all around the world.

Thinking domestically:

Your frozen salmon probably came from Alaska
The shellfish from Maine
And the dairy, milk, and ice cream from dairy farms everywhere in the American heartland

Then, from a global view:

Tilapia, shrimp, and more salmon come from China
Frozen vegetables were farmed in Canada and Peru
And a portion of our red meat comes from Canada

But red meat is one of our biggest exports in the US. And that wouldn't be possible without the global cold chain, either.

The US Exports Tremendous Amounts of Red Meat, Thanks to the Global Cold Chain

In 2019, the US exported 9,313 million pounds of red meat (9,313,000,000 lbs). We imported about half of that amount. And — the funky year of 2020 aside — it's been a growing market for the past decade.

Red meat feeds us directly and supplies jobs for about 780,000 people in the US.

And there's one other key point that has nothing to do with food. We're talking about pharmaceuticals. That's a big topic and worthy of an entire article, and that's a blog for another day. For now, know that vaccines, medications, and treatments are stored and transported via the global cold chain.