How Maersk gives customer real-time visibility from port to port

When a shipment of high-value pharmaceuticals or fresh produce leaves port, the clock starts. For Maersk’s cold-chain customers, what happens during the days and weeks at sea can determine whether cargo arrives market-ready or becomes a costly write-off.

Until fairly recently, that ocean transit was largely invisible. Customers tracked containers to the point of departure and waited until arrival to learn what happened in between. Temperature drops and power interruptions went undetected until the doors opened at the final destination, when intervention was no longer possible. As one example, a 2019 report by the The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) found that roughly 14% of global food spoils before it reaches retailers, totaling about $400 billion in annual losses.

Today, Maersk customers receive near real-time updates on their reefer containers throughout the entire journey, whether the cargo is on a vessel mid-Atlantic or on a truck in Argentina. This capability, powered by the world’s largest private-public LTE network at sea, has fundamentally changed how shippers manage risk and make decisions, a project by Onomondo in partnership with Nokia, 42com Sat, Complea, and ZEDEDA.

Turning visibility into action

The value of real-time data lies not in monitoring, but in what it enables customers to do.

“The main outcome we want to enable is for customers to have insights as early as possible so they can take mitigating actions when things do not go according to plan,” explains Ken West, Reefer Digital Development Manager at Maersk.

Through Captain Peter, Maersk’s visibility platform, customers access everything from temperature and humidity, to GPS location, to O2/CO2 levels, even when the container is at sea. With the upgraded infrastructure, containers transmit hourly readings, a significant improvement from the daily updates available under the previous generation of devices. When conditions deviate from requirements, alerts trigger immediately rather than days later at port.

This transforms how customers operate. For instance, an importer with ten containers arriving in a given week can identify the two showing temperature deviations and route them directly to quality inspection while sending the other eight to distribution. Another example is a shipper whose banana cargo shows temperature stress mid-Atlantic can redirect to a closer port or reallocate to processing rather than fresh retail.

“We’ve seen customers reroute cargo mid-journey,” Ken describes. “A box of bananas that isn’t going to make it all the way to Europe can be offloaded and rerouted instead. Those options simply don’t exist without real-time visibility.“

For pharmaceuticals, verified cold chain data helps streamline cargo release at destination, reducing delays for the entire value chain.

Building trust through transparency

Before real-time visibility, resolving cargo claims was time-consuming for everyone involved. When quality issues arose at destination, customers had no way to determine whether problems originated at the farm, during packing, or during shipment. Getting answers required manual data requests, internal reviews, and lengthy back and forth.

“Customers didn’t really know whether damage happened because the grower left bananas out in the sun or because we as a carrier didn’t maintain temperature,” Ken explains. “They’d raise a claims case, and we’d need to go internally and get the data. It was frustrating for everyone.“

Shared visibility has changed this dynamic entirely. Both parties now see the same information throughout the journey. When problems occur, the data shows where and when. And because the same unified network covers the entire journey, from vessel to port to inland transport, customers can pinpoint exactly where losses occur and start eliminating them, rather than writing off spoilage as an unavoidable cost of global shipping.

“The visibility creates transparency, which allows all stakeholders in the supply chain to improve together,” says Bruce Marshall, Maersk’s Head of Reefer Solutions. “It’s not about apportioning blame. It’s about how we collectively have better outcomes.“

When Maersk first launched Captain Peter in 2019, Maersk’s team found that sharing operational data openly with customers improved the quality of conversations when issues arose. “We didn’t see a big increase in claims at all,” Ken notes. “On the contrary, both parties can clearly see when we are at fault, and they can clearly see when we’ve maintained temperature. The focus shifts to solving problems together.”

Maersk tracks customer sentiment through quarterly surveys, including how significantly Captain Peter influences shipping decisions. When the platform launched, it was a major differentiator as the only carrier-provided visibility solution of its kind. As competitors have introduced similar products, Maersk’s at-sea coverage, enabled by private LTE infrastructure across 450 vessels, continues to set it apart.

The infrastructure behind the platform

Delivering constant updates across ocean and land requires connectivity that works consistently everywhere. Maersk partnered with Onomondo to build what became the world’s largest private-public LTE network deployed on seafaring vessels, spanning 450 vessels at sea and 680+ networks in 180+ countries on land.

The architecture behind Onomondo’s core network and IoT SIMs prioritizes simplicity at scale. Rather than pushing connectivity logic to individual devices, where firmware complexity becomes unmanageable across hundreds of thousands of assets, the network handles routing, security, and cloud integration centrally. Devices don’t need to know where data is going or how to authenticate across regions. When backend systems evolve, the network adapts without requiring firmware updates across the global fleet.

This approach also ensures consistent behavior regardless of geography. A container transmits the same way whether it’s in Rotterdam, crossing the Pacific, or on a truck in Brazil. Regional complexity is removed.

Ken explains, “With this infrastructure, we can change things remotely. There’s also a lower cost of roaming across different regions.“

Positioning for what comes next

With reliable data now flowing across global routes, Maersk is building toward predictive capabilities that move beyond visibility into intelligence.

“We want to help customers interpret information, not just present it,” Ken explains. “We’ve done studies on specific commodities, looking at temperature exposure over certain durations and how much shelf life will potentially remain. We want to provide recommended actions.“

The vision extends to aggregated supply chain analysis. Customers will identify patterns across shipping history: which routes consistently show problems, which origin facilities produce cargo that travels well, and which transshipment ports have longer power-off periods. This intelligence enables data-driven decisions about suppliers, routes, and logistics partners – creating newfound efficiency for both Maersk and its customers.

Bruce sees even broader potential: “If we can have visibility from when cargo comes into the pack house through the ocean crossing to final delivery, we become a different type of logistics provider. Not just moving goods, but consulting on how to improve quality across the entire chain.“

As companies across industries invest in AI and machine learning to optimize operations, the quality of underlying data becomes foundational. Predictive models and automated decision-making require consistent, high-frequency, structured data, exactly what this infrastructure provides.

“If we didn’t have the technology, we would have stopped at the layer of ‘the container is on the ship,’” Bruce reflects. “Now we understand what happens with our cargo inside the container. The next layer is: something’s gone wrong, what can we do? And then: based on everything we know, what do we recommend?“

The underlying connectivity infrastructure is also designed with future technologies in mind. The Private-Public Hybrid Network supports NB-IoT, LTE-M, and LTE today, with a path to 5G as those capabilities mature. For Maersk, this means new use cases that require higher bandwidth or lower latency won’t require another wholesale infrastructure replacement. The foundation is already in place.

Now that the connectivity infrastructure is deployed, the data is flowing freely and can be actioned upon. What Maersk builds on this foundation will shape how its customers manage global supply chains for years to come.