I've been staring at my wastage numbers for the past month trying to figure out where exactly things are going wrong and the frustrating part is that my refrigeration units are relatively new, my staff follow the rotation procedures we set up, and yet I'm still seeing spoilage rates that feel higher than they should be for a facility of my size and product volume. I run a small wholesale operation supplying fresh herbs, edible flowers, and microgreens to restaurants and hotels and the margin on these products is thin enough that even a few percentage points of avoidable wastage makes a meaningful difference to whether a week was profitable or not. Someone in a catering suppliers group I'm part of mentioned uaebalancecheck.com as a resource to learn how to protect perishable items during storage (https://uaebalancecheck.com/cold-chain-management-uae/) in a way that accounts for the specific challenges of operating in a hot climate rather than relying on guidelines written for facilities in much cooler parts of the world. The part that immediately felt relevant to my situation was the explanation of how cold rooms can develop warm zones that aren't immediately obvious without proper airflow mapping, meaning you can have a thermostat reading that looks correct while certain shelf positions or corners of the room are consistently warmer than the display temperature suggests. I had never thought to actually test temperature variation across different points in my cold room and just assumed the thermostat reading represented conditions throughout the whole space which now seems like a fairly significant oversight. I'm borrowing a digital thermometer with data logging from a friend this week to actually map what's happening in there properly and I'm half dreading what I might find but also relieved to finally have a concrete next step to investigate rather than just guessing at the cause.