2016 Cold Chain Global Forum Excellence Awards: Historical Record

The former Cold Chain Global Forum ran its awards from a separate address, awards.coldchainglobalforum.com. This page records the 2016 awards as far as public sources document them.

Verified facts

• On 4 October 2016 Cryoport, Inc. announced that it had won the 2016 Cold Chain Global Forum Excellence Award. [1]
• The company said the award was in the category “Most Effective Risk Assessment, Evaluation and Mitigation for Transportation”. [1]
• The company said the award was accepted on 29 September by Dr. Robert Moore on its behalf. [1]
• The company described the winning project as its work with a global animal health company on a managed solution for cryogenic shipping and storage of animal vaccines. The figures and claims in the release are the company’s own and were not checked. [1]
• An archived copy of the awards site from May 2017 listed four categories for 2016: Best Temperature Controlled Logistics Project; Most Innovative New Cold Chain Technology of the Year; Most Sustainable Temperature-Controlled Project; and Most Effective Risk Assessment, Evaluation and Mitigation for Transportation. It also had a menu entry for “2016 Winners”. [2]
• An archived awards page from August 2016 was dated “September 29, 2016” in Boston. It said applications were evaluated and voted on by a panel of practitioners and stated that IQPC and its vendor partners had no influence on decisions. [3]
• The June 2016 agenda page described a “2nd Annual Cold Chain Excellence Awards ceremony” as part of the week of 26 to 30 September 2016. [4]

Additional detail from the sources

• The acceptance date given in the Cryoport release, 29 September, matches the date shown on the awards page archived in August 2016, which read “September 29, 2016” and “Boston, MA”. [1][3]
• That date falls inside the week of 26 to 30 September 2016 that the June 2016 agenda page and the May 2016 announcement placed at the Hynes Convention Center in Boston. [4]
• The release was issued on 4 October 2016, five days after the date it gave for the acceptance. [1]
• Four categories were listed on the archived awards home page, and only one of them has a documented winner in the sources this page uses. The other three categories have no winner recorded here. [2]
• The organizer’s August 2016 statement about judging said applications were evaluated and voted on by a panel of practitioners. The release describes the award from the winner’s side, and the two descriptions were not compared with any third source. [1][3]

Awards in the neighboring editions

The awards continued after 2016. The agenda page of June 2016 called the 2016 ceremony the “2nd Annual” event. [4] The 2017 brochure scheduled the “2017 Cold Chain Global Forum Excellence Awards” within Main Conference Day Two on Thursday 28 September. [6] For 2018, Almac Group announced that Cold Chain Technologies and Almac Clinical Services had been named winners of Global Forum Excellence Awards for “Best Innovative Supply Chain Strategy” and “Best Supplier Collaboration”; that announcement was published on 13 November 2018. [5] The category names available for 2016 and 2018 differ, and no list of winners for any year was located beyond the ones named.

Source material and scope

What exists: a winner’s press release, two archived pages from the old awards site and one archived agenda page. The release comes from the award recipient, not from the organizer.

What is missing: the 2016 winners page itself (the archived menu points to it, but no copy was found), the finalists, the names of the judges, the criteria in detail, and any statement by the organizer about the Cryoport award. Other winners from 2016 are therefore not named here, and the absence of a company from this page does not mean it did not win. The statement about judging is the organizer’s own description as archived in August 2016.

The old awards address is no longer in service as a nominations site. This page does not accept nominations. It makes no claim that DeltaSpark or Cold Chain Practice received any award.

How this record connects to other archive pages

The ceremony was part of the week described in the 2016 and 2017 agenda records, which carry the June 2016 summary that mentions it. The pre-conference session held earlier in that week is documented in the Master Class A and Fenway visit record. The 2017 awards slot appears among the sessions in the Day Two record, and the 2018 winners announcement is part of the 2018 edition record.

The winner’s press release and the other public documents are listed in the historical resource index. The archive home lists all records, including those for 2015, which this page does not cover.

Editorial analysis: why these topics still matter

This analysis by the Editorial Desk claims nothing about how the 2016 judging worked beyond the organizer’s archived statement, and it does not rate or endorse any company named in the record.

The one category with a documented winner was titled “Most Effective Risk Assessment, Evaluation and Mitigation for Transportation”. The title is useful because it names a sequence of work and no product. A transportation risk assessment for a temperature-controlled shipment starts with a lane, a product and the way the shipment will be moved. The first design choice that follows is the system type, which the guide on active versus passive shipping systems explains as a question of where the system boundary sits and which inputs, such as power, conditioning time or container return, the shipper depends on.

Evaluation then needs evidence. A buyer who reads a supplier’s qualification documents should know what was tested, with which payload and temperature profile, and what the stated limits were. The guide on reviewing a qualification report sets out those questions. Mitigation is partly about visibility during transit, and the guide on real-time versus offline monitoring explains how the timing of data affects what a team can do about an excursion. A self-reported award, as in this record, is a starting point for questions. The evidence behind the project still has to be read.

Editorial reconstruction note

This page was prepared by the Cold Chain Practice Editorial Desk from the public sources listed above. DeltaSpark and Cold Chain Practice are not affiliated with IQPC or the organizers of the former event. There is no registration, no nomination process and no current event. Cryoport and other organizations named here are historical references and are not partners or endorsers of this site, and no logos are shown.