Container tracking software
Container tracking software for fresh produce importers
Generic visibility platforms were built for people moving durable goods, where a container arriving four days late is an inconvenience. Yours is a shelf-life problem with a sold-forward position attached. Trackberry tracks the box the way a produce importer has to read it — against the season and the fruit.
First month free, then €15 a container · No commitment · No card required
- Carriers supported
- 437
- Shipments tracked
- 344
- Built for
- Fresh produce
Why general-purpose tracking falls short for produce
Every container tracking product answers “where is my box”. For most cargo that is the whole question. For a reefer of cherries sold before it sailed, “where” is a proxy for three questions the map does not answer: will it land when I sold it for, is the fruit still worth what I paid, and is there anything I have to do today.
The difference shows in what the software puts first. A platform built for electronics puts the vessel position front and center, because that is what its buyers ask about. But the vessel position is the number on the page that is most often wrong. It comes from AIS, which reports the ship rather than your container, and it stays wrong for as long as your box sits on a quay after transshipment. Meanwhile the events that cost a produce importer money are buried two clicks down or missing entirely: a rollover that shows up as an absence rather than a notification, the day free time starts running.
We explain where the underlying data comes from in the container tracking guide, and it is worth reading before you buy anything, including this. A buyer who knows which source each fact came from judges every vendor better, us included.
What you get
What changes about your working week.
Milestones you can act on, not a dot on a map
Gate-in, loaded, departed, transshipped, discharged, gate-out, empty returned. Each one comes from the carrier with a timestamp, kept apart from the satellite position so you can see when the two disagree. A vessel that sails without a load event for your container is the earliest reliable sign that something went wrong, and nobody will call you about it.
The documents arrive with the box
Packing lists, bills of lading, commercial invoices, phytosanitary certificates, EUR1s and CMRs are read out of your inbox automatically and attached to the shipment they belong to. When a customer or an inspector asks, the cert is one click away rather than one search through eleven months of email.
Alerts on change, not a dashboard you have to visit
An ETA that drifted, an arrival already overdue, a box dwelling at the port, tracking that has gone quiet on a container that should be reporting. The alert is the product. A dashboard nobody opens on a Tuesday is where visibility projects go to die.
Read against the season, not just the calendar
We publish export windows for every origin and crop we cover, so you can read an ETA against what else is landing that week. A late Peruvian arrival means something different in a week when Mexico is also shipping than in one when it is not.
Every carrier in one place
437 carriers supported, ocean and air. Importers rarely run one line, and the alternative to one place is a bookmark folder of portals with different logins and different words for the same event.
Quality on arrival, kept with the shipment
Inspection reports are stored with the container they describe, so a claim filed months later is built from records, not pieced together from memory and a phone’s camera roll.
A good fit if
- You import fresh produce by sea, in reefers, on more than one carrier.
- Your shipment documents arrive by email, from suppliers who each format them differently.
- Somebody on your team currently retypes packing lists into a spreadsheet or your ERP.
- You sell forward, so an ETA that moves is a commercial problem and not just a logistics one.
- You have been burned by a rollover or a demurrage bill nobody saw coming.
Probably not if
- You need freight booking, rate negotiation or customs filing — this does none of those.
- You ship dry cargo where a few days either way costs nothing.
- You move a handful of containers a year; a spreadsheet is fine at that volume.
- You need an on-premise deployment. Trackberry is hosted, and that is not configurable.
- You want a system of record to replace your ERP rather than something that reads into it.
Questions buyers ask
- What does it cost?
- The first month is free, with no card and no commitment. After that €15 per container: you pay for containers that ship, not for seats and not for a monthly subscription, so a quiet month costs you a quiet month. ERP integration is separate, a one-off from €2,000 plus maintenance from €50 a month, quoted against the system you already run. All prices exclude VAT.
- Which carriers can you track?
- 437 ocean and air carriers are supported today. The current list is published at /carriers and updates as our providers add lines, so you can check your own carriers before you book a call.
- Do I need to give you access to my carrier accounts?
- No. A container number or a bill of lading number is enough to start tracking. Milestones come from the carriers through our tracking providers, not from your portal logins.
- How is this different from the free tracking page on my carrier’s website?
- A carrier page shows one box on one carrier, with no history and no alert when something changes. An importer’s work spans several carriers and dozens of boxes, and it starts when something changes: a rollover, a moved ETA, a box that has sat at the terminal too long. A portal cannot do that part.
- What does it not do?
- It does not book freight, negotiate rates, or file customs entries. It does not replace your ERP. It reads what arrives about your shipments and tells you what changed. Anything that means transacting with a carrier happens elsewhere.
- How long until it is useful?
- Forward one shipment’s documents and you will see it working. Most of the setup is deciding which mailbox forwards to us. There is no data migration, because the history builds from the documents and container numbers you already receive.
See it on your own containers
Twenty minutes and your container numbers. You will see the milestones, documents and alerts on shipments you already have on the water, not on a demo dataset.