Safe shipment of pharmaceuticals to end customers: trans-o-flex Express launches B2C Pharma with active temperature control

• Transport should not compromise the effectiveness of medicines. Therefore, deliveries to private households are now possible nationwide in the temperature ranges of 2 to 8 and 15 to 25 degrees.
• Covid has increased trend towards mail-order selling of medicines

trans-o-flex Expressdienst, which specialises in transporting sensitive goods, particularly in the pharmaceutical and healthcare sectors, is now offering its B2C Pharma service, which has been developed for the active temperature-controlled shipment of pharmaceuticals to end customers. "We are receiving more and more enquiries, for example, from mail-order pharmacies, for whom non-temperature-controlled or only passively cooled shipping with a normal parcel service is too unsafe with regard to the effectiveness of the medicines," says Wolfgang P. Albeck, CEO of trans-o-flex. "That’s why customers can now use all our actively temperature-controlled services for shipping to end customers." The timing of this service expansion is deliberate. "Mail-order selling of medicines has increased significantly during the coronavirus pandemic, and this trend seems irreversible," says Albeck. "Therefore, it was time to also offer a safe transport alternative for private deliveries in the room temperature range, in which the majority of medicines are transported." The service is not limited to certain regions, but is being offered nationwide within 24 hours. A temperature history, where consignees can also view the temperature of their consignments throughout transit, is also part of the offer.

With B2C Pharma (business to consumer), trans-o-flex is continuing its strategy of systematically expanding its service for deliveries to private households in selected areas. Expressdienst, which transports most consignments between companies (B2B – business to business), had already added deliveries to private addresses to its product portfolio as a separate offering back in 2018. This service is now being expanded so that customers can also select the complete range of active temperature control for private deliveries. "As the market leader in the area-wide transport of consignments for the pharmaceutical and healthcare industry, we see it as our duty to also open up our network for 2C consignments in the room temperature range, in order to ensure with our active temperature control that pharmaceutical effectiveness is not compromised by excessively high or low temperatures in transit," says Albeck. In 2020, trans-o-flex had demonstrated with around 153,000 systematic measurements of the temperature in the load compartment of non-temperature controlled delivery vehicles that there are practically no days in Germany when there is not a significant risk of falling below or exceeding the temperature range of 15 to 25 degrees Celsius, in which most medicines can be transported without impairing their effectiveness.

The measurements had shown the temperature in the load compartment of a vehicle without temperature control follows the rise in outside temperatures during the course of the day without any significant time delay. However, the load compartment does not heat up slowly and in parallel with the increase in the outside temperature, but the interior temperature increases in some cases exponentially in relation to the outside temperature. Even at an outside temperature of 16 degrees, 10% of all measurements in the load compartment indicated temperatures of more than 25 degrees. And with an outside temperature of 23 degrees, temperatures of over 50 degrees were measured in the loading areas. In addition, the safety of medicines is compromised by considerable temperature fluctuations, for example, during transport over the weekend or during night-time transport, where temperatures are often below zero in the load compartments of non-temperature-controlled delivery vehicles.