Air cargo is the safety valve of the cold chain: when harvest windows are short, shelf life is ticking, and service failures become product loss, “wait a week” is not a viable option. Yet many planning discussions still start from global market averages—demand up or down, capacity up or down—when the cold chain reality is that risk concentrates on specific corridors and specific weeks. For temperature-sensitive food, the question is rarely “is air cargo growing?” It is: “will the right lift exist on my lane, in my season, with enough resilience to absorb disruption?”
Public reporting underscores the economics behind that urgency. Reporting from IATA’s World Cargo Symposium highlighted that food and perishables represent roughly 17% of global air trade weight but only ~1% of value, and that the category’s share has stayed broadly stable between 17–19% from 2019-2025.
In Accenture Cargo’s lane-level analysis, the temperature-controlled (perishables) segment that requires active temperature management accounted for about 12% of global airborne tonnage in January, fluctuating between roughly 10–14% through 2025.
The takeaway is not that perishables are “small”—it’s that they are volume-resilient but margin-sensitive, and therefore highly exposed to avoidable service failures.
The second lesson is that perishables may be stable in share, but they are anything but “average” in pattern. In Accenture Cargo’s analysis, global airborne trade grew +7% (≈164,206 tons) in January vs. January 2025, yet temperature-controlled (perishables) declined -5% (≈-14,013 tons) over the same period. That divergence is exactly what cold chain operators feel on the ground: broad market strength does not guarantee the availability (or affordability) of the specific lift needed for produce, seafood, flowers, and chilled/frozen flows.
Lane-level dispersion is even more operationally meaningful. The world’s largest temperature-controlled (perishables) corridor in Accenture Cargo’s January analysis—Latin America → North America—contracted -10% (≈-8,714 tons) year on year, while Europe → Asia Pacific expanded +31% (≈7,331 tons). In parallel, Africa → Europe declined -10% (≈-2,940 tons). For cold chain planners, those are not abstract trade statistics: they signal where uplift may soften, where allocations may tighten, and where rebooking and contingency routings become more likely.
Seasonality amplifies the point. On Latin America → North America temperature-controlled (perishables), 2025 volumes ranged from about 87,000 tons in the peak month to about 52,000 tons in the trough—an intra-year swing of roughly 36,000 tons. That kind of seasonal “breathing” is why cold chain resilience now depends on lane-level capacity intelligence: understanding not only where demand peaks, but whether the lane is belly-heavy, freighter-led, or reliant on a small number of hubs that can become concentration risks during disruption.
Finally, perishables and pharma both require cold chain visibility, but the planning economics differ. The same WCS reporting highlighted that healthcare/pharma represent about 4% of air cargo weight but ~11% of value, with a positive yield premium. Perishables win on tonnage and time-criticality; pharma wins on value density. Both benefit from predictive visibility, but food shippers often need it to prevent loss and write-offs, not just protect yield.
In practice, the next step for State of Air Cargo readiness is combining lane-level trade signals with capacity tracking and short-horizon nowcasts, so cold chain teams can see risk before it becomes an operational failure.
Disclaimer: This article is provided for informational purposes only and reflects Accenture Cargo analysis using a combination of public reporting and Accenture Cargo datasets. Figures are indicative and may change as underlying sources update. Accenture and its logo are trademarks of Accenture and/or its affiliates.
