About Tower Cold Chain

• the first was the move towards biologic drugs, with the need for temperature control;
• the second was the utter inadequacy of existing packaging, then largely consisting of cardboard, gel packs and polystyrene that had to be thrown away after a single use;
• the third was the growing concern around environmental issues, such as the need to dispose of single-use packaging (ISO14001, the international standard for environmental management systems, was introduced in 1996);
• the fourth, with which Pring was directly associated, was the developing range of regulations, driven by FDA in the USA and being followed by similar agencies across the world, that would dictate the ways in which biologics would be manufactured, stored and distributed globally.

Pring’s conclusion was simple: the market would need a new kind of reusable container, able to regulate temperature to a sufficient extent to facilitate global distribution (120 hours became Tower’s benchmark), robust enough to stand up to the rigours of repeated exposure to the cargo environment, and cost-effective so that the shift from cheap disposable containers could be comfortably amortised over many trips.

Pring’s first company, Kryotrans Ltd, was launched in 1999. The company was based in Dunstable, in Bedfordshire. At this time, Kryotrans Ltd was focused on selling containers to biotech companies.

In 2007 all the products were re-engineered around the use of phase-change materials as a preferred source of power as the market moved from buying to renting containers. Tower was created as a solution for the need to provide easy rentable containers to an ever-expanding market (Tower standing for The One-Way Easy Rental).

Tower’s headquarters are at Theale, less than 30 minutes west of London’s Heathrow Airport. Its other hubs are in strategic locations such as Philadelphia, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Brussels, Frankfurt, Manchester, Singapore, Shanghai, Melbourne, Cape Town and Port Elizabeth: all are supported by a global repositioning service that allows customers to take Tower containers into and out of a wide range of global locations.