ColdTrack sponsored a panel discussion in the Cold Chain Pavilion at the Manifest 2026 event recently where our COO, Luke Vaccaro was joined by Rebecca Linz, VP of Supply Chain at Force of Nature, and Josh Lett, SVP Customer Experience at Deposco to talk about Cold Chain Fulfillment Tech. The discussion was recorded and you can watch it with the video below:
Panel discussion transcript – lightly edited for flow.
TL;DR – Manifest 2026 Panel
ColdTrack, Force of Nature, and Deposco discussed what truly drives performance in temperature-controlled 3PL partnerships: strong network positioning, disciplined operations, and an integrated tech stack that enables end-to-end visibility.
Key themes included:
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FEFO & Lot Traceability: Advanced WMS + OMS integration enables real-time lot tracking, reduced waste, tighter recall control, and higher inventory accuracy.
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Mis-pick Reduction: ColdTrack reduced mis-pick rates down to 0.2%, significantly lowering reships, refunds, and brand risk.
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Pack Accuracy Guarantee: Enabled by tight scanning processes, order-level ownership, and layered inventory checks. Learn more here.
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Dynamic Coolant Optimization: Automated logic adjusts coolant use based on transit time and forecasted temperature to balance cost, performance, and sustainability.
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End-to-End Integration: Real-time connectivity from ecommerce through WMS to shipping enables delivery date promises, shipping guarantees, and improved customer experience.
Bottom line:
Technology alone isn’t enough — but when disciplined operations are paired with a fully integrated supply chain platform, brands can reduce waste, increase accuracy, and confidently make performance guarantees to customers.
Luke
Hey, everybody. I’m Luke Vaccaro from ColdTrack. We’re gonna start out here by doing some quick intros. I wanna pass it to my co-panelists.
Rebecca
Hi everybody. I’m Rebecca Linz. I’m the Vice President of Supply Chain for Force of Nature Meats. We sell meat that is raised using regenerative agriculture practices. Previous to Force of Nature, I spent time at General Mills and at Best Buy.
Force of Nature has been working with ColdTrack and Deposco now for about three or four years.
I’m so excited to be here today
Josh
And I’m Josh Lett, SVP of Customer Experience at Deposco. Over the last 15 years at Deposco. We’re a commerce intelligence platform focused on supply chain intelligence, supply chain planning, and supply chain execution software. And we’ve been working with ColdTrack and Force of Nature over the last few years, and I’m excited to be sharing with you today.
Luke
I’m the COO of ColdTrack. We are a 3PL cold chain provider. Prior to ColdTrack, I worked at Hunger Root, which is an AI-driven grocery platform. So lots of experience in the perishable space.
I’m really excited to talk to you today about our capabilities. And with that, we’ll go to the first slide.
There we go. Rebecca, you wanna take us through? Rebecca’s gonna talk about 3PL selection, what’s important to the brand, and we were lucky enough that she chose us.
Rebecca
As you’re evaluating a 3PL from a brand perspective, there’s a lot of things you need to consider. And I think about, first of all, especially in a temperature-controlled environment, facility location is incredibly important. We need to get our product to our consumers within two days. So it’s really important our network enables that.
And then of course, we need to have the costing that’s gonna fit our business model. So I consider those like table stakes, if we wanna use a venue appropriate analogy! And then from there, what really differentiates the best providers are leveraging a really great tech stack with really awesome people that have great processes. If you’ve got all of those, then you start to have really good performance on things that really are near and dear to my heart, like inventory management, on-time fulfillment and order picking accuracy.
Luke
Awesome. Thanks for taking us through that. Next, just wanna talk a little bit about, FEFO [First Expired, First Out], lot traceability, and why it’s so important these days. The bar on traceability keeps rising. We have been able to offer our customers, wonderful traceability through the use of the Deposco software. You can’t implement traceability on FEFO properly without a great WMS. It’s just simply not possible on spreadsheets alone and less capable systems only take you so far. First off, let me just get into FEFO. Most people work in a F-I-F-O [First In First Out] world. Unless you’re really bad at inventory, you follow the FIFO method – first-in typically stays here. But that doesn’t work in perishable. You waste a lot of food. But first expiration, first out, is much better.
Sometimes our vendors or our customers’ vendors mis-rotate their production, right, so we might get something with a production code that is earlier than something we might have in stock, right? So after we receive that in, we wanna make sure that sort of jumps to the front of the line and gets into customer boxes first, right? So FEFO – first expired, first out versus first received first out is super critical.
And then we talk about lot traceability. Our customers are able to see each customer order that goes out, every product in that order, and what lot it came from. Which is pretty powerful.
So, if you have a recall, you’re able to cast a much smaller net and identify the product impacted. You need that end-to-end traceability throughout the process. You can’t just receive it, put it on a pick line. You have to monitor the movement of that product throughout the facility. It needs to be scanned, verified all the way through.
We receive it into pallet level LPNs and then track those pallet level LPNs right up until the case gets into the pick face. And then we know exactly how that inventory’s being depleted in real time, and we know exactly which lots go into customer boxes
Once again, that’s something that I think right now it’s starting to change from a nice-to-have to eventually it’ll be table stakes, right?
Anything you want to add there, Josh?
Josh
Yeah, I would just add, flexibility is key when it comes to FEFO. FEFO or other allocation strategies. Not just to allocate the inventory, to make sure you get it right every time, but also the flow-through of the processes, each and every point of that motion. Some companies value extremely high accuracy, and highly traceability, where those scans are tracked every single time. And then other times you might have a little bit of flexibility on the inbound or outbound side.
So flexibility to not just be on or off is really important as well. But to go two or three levels deep into the, the setup and the configuration, that’s not just important to the 3PL, to the technology provider, but also to the brand.
The ability to go recognize the lot, go find the customer that might need to be reached out to, to discuss the different impacts of FEFO and the ability to track product that all the way through. So absolutely what Luke mentioned.
Luke
That’s a great point. I’m glad you brought up the flexibility piece, because that’s a big part of why we love Deposco.
As a 3PL we need to be super flexible. Most customers want something pretty similar, but there are some subtleties. And there’s some different capability differences. As an example, some customers have barcodes on all their master case packs, others don’t.
We have to be able to accommodate in those instances. That’s just a really small example, but one that really matters. So flexibility is a big, a big piece.
Rebecca, tell us what the true cost of a mis-pick is.
Rebecca
Mis-pick is my least favorite word. A mis-pick is essentially when our consumer orders a certain set of products and unfortunately they don’t get that exact set of products. It could be in our case they ordered a ribeye steak and they got a flank steak instead. Both are great products. But your consumer who ordered it is not gonna be happy with that exchange, right? So, it’s really important for us to have low mis-pick rates and, we’ve worked with several different 3PLs and I would say that, on average, with other 3PLs we were working with, we were at about a one and a half to 2% mis-pick rate.
With ColdTrack we’re under half a percent. And I would say year to date, I think we’re around 0.2%.
When you think about that, that’s literally hundreds of customers that are now actually getting exactly what they ordered versus not.
And that’s word of mouth impact that can reach thousands of people. All of a sudden you’re talking about a really large brand impact when you are having that low mis-pick rate versus the higher one.
It’s just frankly really expensive to have to reship product, to have to refund folks and things like that. So mis-picks are really not a good thing and we’ve been so happy that with ColdTrack and leveraging the Deposco system that those are really, really low at this point for us.
Luke
Yeah, and not to get too pitchy, but just to clarify, when we talk about mis-picks, it’s at an order level, right? So, when we’re at 0.2%, it’s 0.2% of orders. If Rebecca’s orders have 15 or 20 picks in them, there’s 15, 20 opportunities for a defect, right? We’re only kind of counting it once.
You have to be at the, at the item level. You have to be way better than 0.2% at the item level to get it to 0.2% at the order level, if that makes sense.
Next, I want to talk to you about our industry first: the pack accuracy guarantee. And, what sort of made that possible?
Just a very, very brief history on that.
Our sales leader, Warner Siebert, had the brilliant idea to offer this pack guarantee. As the ops curmudgeon that I am, I initially hated the idea giving away boxes if we had a single mistake until I just kind of woke up and saw the numbers and realized yeah, we basically make very few mistakes, so sure, guarantee it! No problem at all!
And we could not have done that prior to Deposco.
As Rebecca mentioned, we’re probably in the one half of a percent range.
Please keep me honest here. Chime in where you want. But there’s a, there’s a set of things that we’ve done with the tech stack, Deposco in particular, that have really enabled this. You can’t replace good operating discipline and leadership at the platform level. But without super tight process in tech, those kind of levels just aren’t possible.
A couple things: One, each ColdTrack associate is picking complete orders. We’re not passing orders along down a line of people. One person’s responsible for the box. And every single thing gets scanned into that box.
If it’s a quantity of 19 items, there’s 19 scans into that box. We make sure that we’re taking a little bit of extra time to make sure there are no issues. Inventory awareness is a big deal. Anytime you have a picker or any kind of operator going out of sequence because there’s an exception, there’s just an opportunity for error. The Deposco system does a great job of making sure.
It’s really like a two-level inventory awareness:
1. We don’t release anything to our WMS unless we know there’s enough inventory in the whole facility to fulfill it
2. Then when we release orders to the pick line, Deposco is checking to make sure that the picker in those pick locations has enough inventory to service that order. They’re not coming to a location and finding, wait, there’s nothing here. If so, then the exception loop starts. It’s a big, big deal
The other thing is on the OMS side, we’re figuring out exactly what size box or how many boxes the order needs to go into so there’s no interruption there.
There’s a lot that goes into making sure there’s no interruptions to that picker flow. And then after we pick it, we have some other software that’s linked in with Deposco that makes sure that we scan each box shipping label to a pallet ID – to an outbound pallet, and then scan the outbound pallet onto a truck.
There’s mistake proofing logic built within the system that makes sure we’re not putting a FedEx package onto an OnTrack truck, or vice versa. A lot of good processes and error proofing built in throughout.
Josh
I’d add to that, and Luke hit on it, a number of really, really important points there. Hopefully you heard the integrated supply chain is really important, and data and the understanding of what the brand is trying to do to reach their customer. So integration to their various e-commerce systems, marketplaces, other things to get real time visibility around the orders. The aspect of inventory visibility so that you’re not doing any overselling or even underselling in aspects where the inventory is not accurate. For us, we’ve integrated the entire supply chain from the e-commerce systems to the marketplaces, to the order management system through the WMS and through the shipment – from click to customer all the way through.
The ability to see the visibility end-to-end gives you the aspect that you can now layer in intelligence on top of that to not just impact what us as a provider of software can offer to the 3PL, but the value that it brings to the brand as well.
If the brand is now able to offer more to their customers, even make guarantees of shipping times – get it to you the next day, same day, two days, whatever the competitive advantage needs to be – but also on the 3PL to offer order management solutions, pack accuracy guarantees, like what ColdTrack is doing, it’s an incredibly cohesive supply chain that is highly connected and very data oriented, but also has intelligence on top of that.
What we’ve been able to see is a massive opportunity to be able to put a stamp of approval out to the markets that says when you order something, you’re gonna get it right every single time. I absolutely agree with everything that Luke mentioned there. Yeah.
Luke
Appreciate it. If I can, I’ll just add a couple more things. You mentioned being able to share the exact shipping times and things with our customers. We actually literally just last week implemented that when you order, you will get an expected delivery date, which we hadn’t been able to do prior to being able to leverage this technology. When you order a $200, $250 box of meat, you wanna know where that’s gonna be and when it’s gonna get to you, especially if you’re buying it for a party or a Super Bowl or whatever the case might be.
We’re really excited to have that capability.
You also mentioned the optimization around cartonization and coolant. As a company that cares very much for our environment, we always wanna reduce waste as much as possible.
Being able to ship something in the smallest amount of boxes and with the least amount of coolant, but making sure that actually it’s gonna stay frozen until it gets to the consumer’s home is incredibly important to us.
The system optimizes in the summer. If it’s hotter, if it gets above 85 degrees, it’s gonna automatically add in a little more dry ice. In the winters, it can pull that back. Those types of features are incredibly important to our business for the environmental impact. But again, also the bottom line impact as well. All great points. Appreciate you guys adding that.
I would also just talk about waste in the environment. One of the things end-to-end management gets you is just a lot better inventory accuracy. To your point, you’re not overpromising or under promising, but also you’re just not mis-rotating. And you’re not throwing out food.
A lot of our customers, Force of Nature in particular, sell pretty high-end stuff. It’s not just that the cost of goods is very expensive. You guys go through great lengths to make sure things are responsibly sourced and are the finest quality.
If you look at our, our inventory claims over the last couple of years, they’re almost non-existent at this point.
I wish I could say they were always non-existent, but that wouldn’t be true. We’ve seen an incredible reduction there thanks to the new tech and processes we have.
All right. So I think at this point we’re gonna open it up for a little Q and A.
Audience Question
Thanks for the presentation and thanks for your insights. A question for Rebecca. You mentioned one point that you’re optimizing the amount of coolant that you’re putting in, but how is it dynamic? Is it through an application? Is it connected to Deposco?
Can give some details please.
Rebecca
Actually I’m gonna hand that over to Josh ’cause I think he’d be able to take that, or Luke.
Luke
No problem, great question. We’re pretty flexible in terms of how we handle the ice – Coolant logic.
It’s always dynamic. The coolant logic is actually housed at our OMS (ColdTrack Live) level but is synchronized with Deposco. We can generate ice logic based on pretty much any factor you want, but the two most common things are end destination zip code temperature – wherever the customer is – whatever the forecasted temp is on the delivery day becomes an input.
The other big input is travel time, specifically for when it leaves at what I would call out of cold chain temperature time. Meaning, outside of the ColdTrack facility, and when it gets to the customer. In our world, that’s generally one or two days.
Most customers, particularly if you’re shipping meat never want to plan for delivery that takes more than two days. Whether it’s one day or two days, it’s gonna require less or more ice.
But yes, it’s all dynamic with an API to the forecasted temperature daily.
Any other questions?
Audience Question
You mentioned same-day delivery. How close are we to that and how big for Force of Nature is that trajectory to where you wanna be?
Rebecca
I would say we are a little ways away from same-day delivery at this point just because of where we are we’re at in our growth. We are not in all of the ColdTrack locations yet, but we are in three of their locations.
As we get larger, it’s gonna make more sense to be in more locations around the country, and then we’ll be closer, which will allow for a more likelihood of same-day delivery. I would say that it’s an important piece. Or at least next day delivery is an important piece as we think about people are not always great at planning ahead for when they need things, right? If they can place an order and that next day they could have it, that opens up a whole world of options for our expanded assortment because we are in retail as well, but by far not all of our assortment is in every retail place.
Being able to get those expanded SKUs is important.
Luke
Just a plug for Force of Nature: They’re wild boar is fantastic! I make it all the time for the family.
Now the other thing I just wanted to add to your question, and thanks for that, is I feel like in our world, one of the biggest sources of confusion sometimes is when people talk about shipping and delivery, right? You have your ship day, which in our world, ColdTrack is when the package departs the facility. And delivery is when, of course, it arrives at the customer.
That might sound like I’m stating the obvious, but believe it or not, we talk over each other. Sometimes same day shipping is something that’s available today. If we have some customers that want to keep their prime badge on Amazon – we support Seller Fulfilled Prime as an example – if the order comes in before 4:00 PM same day, we’ve gotta get it out, right? Which means our shipping software has to be dynamic enough to take into account time of day because maybe some regional carriers picked up a little bit earlier, now we got a set up of FedEx or UPS. But, so there’s a lot of dynamism in that decision right there.
But same day shipping is something we could offer lot of people based on zip code. It just gets a little costly.
Our regional carriers and parcel carriers have super-efficient networks with a lot of density and we could offer deliveries the same day we get the orders, but the economics are a little bit less favorable for the consumer.
