How Global Reefers and KLog.co are scaling DCSA standards across Latin America

Discover how KLog.co helped Global Reefers reduce 60 hours per month in manual tasks and scale DCSA standards for reefer traceability across Latin America.

From one pioneering project to a regional standard

Each cherry season, Global Reefers manages thousands of refrigerated containers moving from Chile to Asia under strict cold-treatment protocols and tight delivery windows. In 2024–2025, the company became the first freight forwarder in Latin America to adopt DCSA’s Reefer Events 1.0 Beta standard, integrating Hapag-Lloyd LIVE via API and cutting an estimated 60 hours of manual processing per month while giving customers real-time visibility into temperature and treatment status.

Building on that success, Global Reefers and KLog.co – a Latin American digital freight forwarder and logistics software platform – have now taken the next step: extending DCSA standards beyond a single shipper–carrier connection into a scalable, multi-party data backbone for the region.

By implementing DCSA Track & Trace for Global Reefers within the KLog.co platform, both companies are demonstrating how standards can become the “common language” for reefer logistics in Latin America – not only between carriers and forwarders, but across cargo owners, technology providers and new value-added services.

Learn about the case in Spanish: Cómo Global Reefers y KLog.co están escalando los estándares DCSA en América Latina

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The challenge: fragmented data in a fast-scaling ecosystem

Chile’s export ecosystem is growing fast, especially in high-value perishables such as cherries. That growth translates into more carriers, more services, more data sources and more stakeholders needing the same information, now. Before adopting DCSA standards, Global Reefers and its partners faced three recurring problems:

  • Heterogeneous formats: each carrier exposed reefer and tracking data differently, forcing Global Reefers to normalise data manually.
  • Operational friction: Global Reefers’ team had to key in or re-format data for thousands of containers in peak weeks, increasing the risk of errors and delays.
  • Limited reuse of integrations: each new service or customer meant new custom work, rather than plugging into a shared structure.

KLog.co, meanwhile, had a clear strategic ambition: if its platform spoke DCSA “natively”, any actor in the ecosystem could integrate once and reuse that connection across multiple services and flows.

“Our goal was simple: if we adopt DCSA deeply in our platform, anyone can plug into KLog.co and consume modern, standardised logistics data without reinventing the wheel each time,” says Álvaro Serrano, CTO at KLog.co.

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The solution: Global Reefers + KLog.co on DCSA Track & Trace

After Global Reefers’ initial rollout of DCSA Reefer Events 1.0 Beta with Hapag-Lloyd LIVE, the next step was to bring KLog.co into the architecture as the regional digital backbone.
In the joint project:

  • Global Reefers continued to operate as the specialised reefer expert and cargo owner interface, already familiar with DCSA’s Reefer Events model and its operational implications.
  • KLog.co implemented DCSA Track & Trace (v2.2) on its side, starting with its existing direct connection to Hapag-Lloyd and exposing a unified, standardised API for Global Reefers and its customers.

From the platform point of view, KLog.co made a deliberate bet: instead of defining a proprietary data model, it aligned its core tracking and reefer data structures with DCSA. According to Serrano, this choice is already paying off:

  • Over the years, as carriers enrich their APIs, co and Global Reefers have been able to consume more and more information without changing the underlying standard, confirming its versatility.
  • The new DCSA data structure has simplified implementation and visualisation in KLog.co's own products, making it easier to build user interfaces that are consistent across carriers.

“We’ve been following the DCSA standard for years and its versatility is evident. As carriers add more data, we keep gaining visibility without having to redesign our model each time,” adds Serrano.

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“The real challenge was standardising everything without interrupting live operations. By using DCSA as the contract between systems, we were able to migrate from our legacy provider to KLog.co, onboard new carriers and keep all customer-facing tracking consistent, without starting from scratch each time.”

- Cristóbal Lira, Data Engineer at Global Reefers

Implementation: from pilot to reusable building block

The technical implementation followed three principles:

1. Standard first

KLog.co adopted the DCSA Track & Trace data model as the internal “source of truth” for tracking events related to Global Reefers flows. This ensured that every new carrier connection and every new customer integration would reuse the same structure.

2. API-driven architecture

Using its existing API to Hapag-Lloyd and the newly implemented DCSA-compliant endpoint for Global Reefers, KLog.co now exposes a unified interface for track & trace and reefer data. Global Reefers’ systems – and, by extension, its customers – can subscribe to events without worrying about the underlying carrier logic.

3. Co-designed experience

Product and operations teams from both companies worked together to ensure that the way DCSA events are displayed in KLog.co reflects how reefer specialists like Global Reefers actually operate: focusing on cold-treatment milestones, exception handling and customer-facing visibility rather than raw telemetry.

DCSA’s documentation, developer portal and prior experience with Reefer Events significantly shortened the learning curve. KLog.co’s long-term exposure to the standard made the jump to a full Track & Trace implementation much more straightforward.

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Impact: from one implementation to a regional ecosystem

The combined Global Reefers + KLog.co implementation has three main impacts:

  • Easier, faster integrations for cargo owners.
  • A scalable model for new services.
  • A concrete reference for Latin America.

“In fresh-produce logistics, visibility is not optional — it’s what protects our customers’ product, their seasons and their margins. By adopting DCSA standards, we can deliver consistent, real-time traceability across carriers, enabling decisions that directly extend shelf life and reduce risk throughout the cold chain. For us, standardisation isn’t just a technical choice; it’s the foundation for a more reliable, predictable experience for growers and exporters.” — Rodrigo Reyes, CTO at Global Reefers

“Having DCSA at the core of our platform means that anyone – cargo owners, partners, or even other logistics providers – can integrate with a modern, future-proof structure. That’s how we see the ecosystem growing: on top of shared standards, not isolated projects,” says Serrano.

Looking ahead, KLog.co expects to contribute feedback and recommendations to DCSA as it gains more experience with the new structure in real-world, multi-party deployments – moving from early adopter to active co-shaper of the standard.

DCSA T&T

What’s next

Global Reefers and KLog.co see this project not as a one-off integration, but as the foundation for a broader Latin American network of DCSA-aligned services. The next steps under discussion include:

  • Onboarding additional carriers through DCSA-compliant APIs.
  • Extending DCSA coverage beyond track & trace and reefer events into bookings, bills of lading and schedules as carrier adoption progresses.
  • Opening KLog.co’s DCSA-based data services to more cargo owners and solution providers in the region.

In a context where logistics complexity is only increasing, the Global Reefers + KLog.co partnership shows a practical path forward: use global standards as the common language and build regional innovation on top.

Three main features

Perspective analytics

Global Reefers uses the KLog.co tracking module, which implements DCSA Track & Trace v2.2. This tool allows subscription to real-time logistics events, with standardized structures for all shipping lines, facilitating uniform, predictable traceability and useful for exception management.

Unified API for Reefers and Events

KLog.co's platform offers Global Reefers a DCSA-compliant API that exposes both temperature data and key logistics milestones. This eliminated the need to standardize data across shipping lines and simplified integrations with internal and customer systems.

Visualization of Critical Milestones in Cold Treatment

Beyond telemetry, Global Reefers values ​​KLog.co's platform for displaying key moments in the reefer process: treatment start and end times, transits, alerts, and deliveries. This visualization enables proactive decision-making and improved communication with exporters.

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