How Global Reefers and KLog.co are scaling DCSA standards 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

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.

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.