Reefer cargo claims: how importers document and win them

The fruit came off the vessel soft, your buyer has rejected half of it, and the carrier’s first reply says the cargo was already deteriorating when it was stuffed. What you recover now depends on what you do in the next three days, and on evidence that had to be captured before the container ever sailed.

One caveat first. This page describes how a cargo claim works and what tends to decide it. It is not legal advice, and none of it survives contact with the wording on the back of your own bill of lading. For anything large or contested, use a marine surveyor and a claims professional — your insurer’s recovery team, or a lawyer who does this every week.

The clock is brutal #

Most container bills of lading on EU and UK trades apply the Hague-Visby Rules, and those rules set three deadlines. All of them start at delivery, whether or not anyone has looked inside the box.

Damage you can see must be noted in writing at the place of delivery, before or as the goods are handed over. That means the driver’s paperwork at the gate, not a phone call the next morning. Damage you cannot see — the pallet that looks sound and is cooked in the middle — must be notified in writing within three days. And everything must be in court or in arbitration within one year of delivery.

The deadlines are not equally fatal, and this is the part most articles get wrong. Missing the three-day notice does not end the claim. It ends a presumption: the carrier is now treated as having delivered the cargo in the condition its bill of lading described, and you have to prove otherwise. The one-year time bar is the one that genuinely ends things. It can be extended, and carriers grant extensions in writing as a matter of routine — but only to someone who asks, and only before it falls.

So the sentence that kills claims is “we will sort it out once we know what the loss is”. A year is not long when a survey report takes six weeks and every letter is answered thirty days after it arrives.

The first 72 hours #

None of this needs a lawyer. All of it becomes impossible or worthless later.

• Do not move, repack, sell or destroy anything until it has been documented. A pallet that has been reworked is no longer evidence of how it arrived.
• Note the damage on the delivery paperwork at the gate, in words a stranger could use. “Fruit soft, condensation on cartons, top layer collapsed” beats “damaged”.
• Photograph in order: seals and container number intact, the doors open with the stow untouched, each pallet as it comes out, then the empty floor.
• Take pulp temperatures on arrival, per pallet, with a calibrated probe. Record which pallet and which position each reading came from. Front, middle and door end tell different stories.
• Ask for the reefer data download in writing the same day. The box is going back to a depot, and the trip data gets slower and harder to obtain once it does.
• Put the carrier on notice in writing and say that you hold them liable. Two lines is enough; the point is the date on it.
• Tell your insurer immediately. The policy has its own notice period, usually much shorter than three days.
• Appoint a surveyor for anything material and invite the carrier to a joint survey. A joint inspection settles what was in the box, which is otherwise the argument that consumes the year.

Then mitigate. You are required to limit the loss, so sound fruit gets sold, marginal fruit goes to a salvage buyer at whatever it makes, and every sale is documented. Cargo destroyed on your own initiative, before a surveyor has seen it, is cargo whose value nobody can now establish.

What the evidence has to prove #

A cargo claim runs in three moves. You show the goods were shipped in apparent good order and arrived damaged. The carrier must then bring the loss within one of the defences its contract allows. If it does, you get a chance to show the real cause was something the carrier answers for.

Perishables are weakest at the first move, and the reason is one line on a document. A clean bill of lading is a receipt for the outside of the cartons. It says the boxes were dry and square. It says nothing about the fruit inside, its maturity or its temperature — which is the whole of a temperature claim.

The file that closes that gap is built at origin, weeks before anyone knows there is a problem. Pre-cooling records showing the load reached specification before it was stuffed. Pulp temperatures at stuffing, taken pallet by pallet. The origin quality inspection, the phytosanitary certificate and any cold treatment records. Loading photographs showing the stow below the red load line with the floor channels clear. At the other end you add the arrival pulp temperatures, the survey report, and the container’s own record of the voyage.

Reading the data log #

Every reefer writes a log. Depending on the unit you get supply and return air temperature, the setpoint it was holding, ambient temperature, humidity, defrost cycles, alarms, and power on and off events. Where a cold treatment applied, the calibrated probes that sat in the fruit are on it too.

Four shapes come up again and again, and they point in different directions.

Power gaps. The unit was off. Some of that is normal — a box is unplugged for the crane move and plugged in again at the stack. Twenty minutes at Rotterdam is nothing. Fourteen hours at a tropical hub, on a box full of respiring fruit, is the whole claim.

A setpoint nobody ordered. The unit held a temperature perfectly and it was the wrong temperature, usually after a typing error at a terminal. This is the cleanest carrier fault there is: the log proves it, and there is no equipment failure to argue about.

Sensors disagreeing. Supply and return air telling stories that cannot both be true, or a probe that goes flat and never moves again. Drift is not itself damage, but it decides whether the rest of the log means anything.

Genuine unit failure. Alarms, short cycling, defrosts that repeat or run long, a return air temperature that never comes down.

None of these mean much alone. What turns a log into an account of what happened is laying it against the voyage — which port, which move, which vessel. A power gap on its own is a data point. A power gap that starts at a discharge at a transshipment hub and ends forty hours later, at the load onto the second vessel, is something else. That is a missed connection, with your fruit standing on the quay throughout it. Ask for the pre-trip inspection report as well: a unit that was already marginal when it was released to your shipper is worth knowing about.

The defences, and what answers them #

Inherent vice is the first thing you will hear. The fruit carried the cause of its own deterioration, so nothing the carrier did is responsible. It is the strongest defence available against a perishable claim, and it is not a bad-faith argument — sometimes it is simply true. Only the origin file answers it.

The next two are variations on the same idea. Inadequate pre-cooling puts the failure at the packhouse. The log supports that reading if return air sat far above setpoint for the first days while the unit ran flat out. Improper stuffing puts it on your shipper: pallets slid over the floor channels, or a load stacked past the red line so air could not get over the top. Loading photographs answer both, which is why they are worth the two minutes they cost.

One defence carriers reach for and usually lose is worth knowing about. The rules excuse a carrier for faults in navigating or managing the ship. But running the refrigeration plant on your container is care of the cargo, not management of the ship. A box that was never plugged in does not fall inside that excuse.

Three of those four arguments are about what happened before the doors closed. That is why origin-side evidence matters as much as anything measured at discharge.

Insurance, the carrier, or both #

For most reefer losses the practical route is the insurance policy, and the reason is a cap rather than a principle. Carrier liability is limited per package or per kilogram, whichever gives the higher figure, unless you declared the value of the cargo and paid for it. A container normally counts as one package, unless the bill of lading enumerates the pallets or cartons inside it. How your transport document describes the load can therefore be worth more than the arithmetic of the loss.

So the usual sequence is: claim on the policy, the insurer pays, and the insurer then pursues the carrier in your name. That is subrogation, and it comes with an obligation attached. Almost every cargo policy requires you to preserve the rights of recourse against the carrier. You still send the notice, still ask for the extension, still keep the evidence. An insurer that finds the claim against the carrier already dead in your hands can reduce what it pays you.

Two exclusions catch produce importers more than any others. Standard cargo clauses exclude loss caused by delay, even where the delay came from an insured peril. Shelf life lost to a two-week rollover is usually not an insured loss at all. And refrigerated cargo needs a clause of its own. Machinery breakdown is not automatically covered by an all-risks policy. The cover that does respond to it often responds only where the breakdown ran for a stated minimum number of hours.

Then there is the case that has nothing to do with your cargo at all. After a fire, a grounding or a salvage, general average is declared, and every cargo interest on the vessel contributes to the cost of saving the voyage. Your container is held until security is posted. For fruit that is fatal even when the box was never opened, and it is the clearest argument for being insured. An insurer issues the guarantee in hours; a first-time importer arranging a cash deposit takes weeks it does not have.

Build the file before you need it #

Read back over what actually decides a claim and almost all of it is evidence that had to exist while nothing was wrong. Pulp temperatures at stuffing. Photographs of a stow that turned out to be fine. A log pulled from a container that arrived perfectly, on the shipment before this one.

The other half is the timeline, and that is the part importers reconstruct from memory and email threads six weeks later. When was it discharged. How long did it sit at the hub between two vessels. Did the vessel arrive four days late, and against which schedule. Continuous tracking answers those with timestamps recorded as they happened rather than assembled afterwards. That is what reefer monitoring does for the box, and what Trackberry does for the voyage around it. You cannot stop a unit failing at sea. You can make sure that when it does, half the claim file is already written.

FAQ #

How long do I have to make a cargo claim? #

Under the Hague-Visby Rules, damage you can see must be notified in writing at delivery, hidden damage within three days, and proceedings must be started within one year of delivery. The one-year limit is the one that ends a claim outright, though carriers routinely grant written extensions if you ask before it expires.

Does a clean bill of lading prove my fruit was in good condition? #

Only on the outside. It records that the cartons appeared sound when the carrier received them, and says nothing about the fruit inside, its maturity or its temperature. Pulp temperatures and a quality inspection at origin are what prove the condition of the cargo itself.

Can the carrier refuse to give me the reefer temperature log? #

In practice you get it if you ask promptly and in writing, and most lines supply it as a matter of course. The risk is not refusal but delay: once the container has gone back and been through its next pre-trip inspection, obtaining the trip data becomes slow and sometimes impossible.

What happens if I sell or dump the damaged fruit before a survey? #

You are required to limit the loss, so selling sound and salvageable fruit is correct. Do it after the cargo has been inspected and photographed, and keep every sale document. Destroying cargo before a surveyor has seen it removes the evidence of what was wrong with it, and claims are refused on exactly that.

Should I claim on my insurance or against the carrier? #

Usually the insurer first, because carrier liability is capped per package and a container often counts as a single package. Even then, put the carrier on notice and protect the deadline: your policy almost certainly requires you to preserve the right of recovery that the insurer will use afterwards.

Is a temperature excursion on its own enough to win a claim? #

No. You have to connect the excursion to the damage and to the carrier’s responsibility for it, which means showing the fruit left origin at specification. A short drift on a properly pre-cooled load usually proves nothing either way.