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.
Free while in beta, then €10 a container · No commitment · No card required
- Carriers supported
- 435
- Shipments tracked
- 249
- Built for
- Fresh produce
Why general-purpose tracking underserves 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 gap shows up in what the software chooses to make prominent. A platform built for electronics puts the vessel position front and centre, because that is what its buyers ask about. But a vessel position is the one number on the page that is frequently wrong — it comes from AIS, which reports the ship rather than your container, and stays confidently wrong for as long as your box sits on a quay after transshipment. Meanwhile the events that actually cost a produce importer money — a rollover that shows up as an absence rather than a notification, the day free time starts burning — are buried two clicks down or absent entirely.
We wrote up how the underlying data actually works in the container tracking guide, and it is worth reading before you buy anything — including this. A buyer who understands which source a given fact came from evaluates every vendor better, us included.
What you get
Not a feature list — the things that change about your week.
Milestones you can act on, not a dot on a map
Gate-in, loaded, departed, transshipped, discharged, gate-out, empty returned — sourced from the carrier, timestamped, and 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 signal 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 an ETA is legible 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
435 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 live against the container they describe, so a claim months later is assembled from records rather than reconstructed from memory and a phone 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 genuinely 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?
- Free while we are in beta — no card, no commitment. After that €10 per container: you pay for containers that actually 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?
- 435 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 booking a call rather than after.
- 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. The work an importer actually does is across carriers, across dozens of boxes, and it is triggered by change — a rollover, a moved ETA, a vessel that sailed without your container on it. That is the part a portal cannot do.
- 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 requires transacting with a carrier happens elsewhere.
- How long until it is useful?
- Forwarding one shipment's documents is enough to 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, your container numbers, and you will see the milestones, the documents and the alerts on shipments you already have on the water — not on a demo dataset.