Cold Chain Shipment MKT Calculator

Refrigerated shipments are usually qualified to 2–8 °C, with the validated shipper rated for a defined duration; 8 °C is the upper limit here. The authoritative limit is whatever your product's labelled storage condition and stability data specify — read it off the marketing authorisation, the manufacturer's storage statement or the governing pharmacopoeia, and enter your real temperature history against it.

Not automatically — that is exactly what MKT resolves. A spike on a hot tarmac contributes heavily (Arrhenius weighting) but if the rest of the journey ran cool, the MKT over the whole transit may still sit within 8 °C. Enter the complete logger trace; if MKT passes and no product-specific hard limit (e.g. an absolute 'never above 25 °C' or a freeze) was breached, the shipment can usually be accepted per your incoming-goods SOP. If MKT fails, quarantine and assess against the product's stability data.

Because degradation is not linear with temperature — it accelerates roughly exponentially (Arrhenius). A simple average treats an hour at 30 °C the same as an hour at 20 °C either side of 25 °C, but the product is harmed far more by the hot hour. MKT weights each reading by exp(−ΔH/RT), so it reflects the true cumulative chemical stress. It is always ≥ the arithmetic mean, and it is the figure regulators expect for storage and distribution compliance.

Use a representative series with durations — typically the logger's interval readings, or summarised blocks of 'X hours at Y °C' if you only have an excursion summary. The more granular the data, the more accurate the MKT, but the result is dominated by the warm excursions, so capturing those accurately matters most. Don't average data before entering it — that defeats the point; enter the temperatures and let the calculator do the kinetic weighting.