A newly launched insurance product now protects freight forwarders against financial losses from late deliveries and temperature-damaged cargo, according to a report by The Loadstar.

The cover addresses two of the most persistent pain points in air and ocean freight forwarding: schedule reliability and cold-chain integrity. Neither the logistics sector's volatile transit times nor the sensitivity of pharmaceutical and perishable shipments are new problems, and the product's arrival signals that underwriters see enough demand to price and package these risks for intermediaries rather than shippers alone.

Why does this matter for forwarders?

Forwarders typically sit between carriers, whose liability regimes are limited, and cargo owners, whose expectations are not. Delay-related claims in particular have historically been difficult to recover, because carrier contracts and international conventions such as the Montreal and Hague-Visby frameworks cap or exclude compensation for consequential losses.

Temperature excursions add a second exposure layer. Pharma, food and electronics shipments can lose value entirely when a cold chain breaks, and proving where in the chain the failure occurred has often left forwarders absorbing costs they could not pass on.

The new product, as reported by The Loadstar, is structured to pay out on these events directly to the forwarder, closing a gap between traditional marine cargo policies — which cover physical loss or damage — and the commercial reality that late or degraded cargo carries a cost even when the goods arrive intact.

What it changes

• Forwarders gain a contractual mechanism to recover losses from delay and temperature events, rather than relying on carrier goodwill or litigation.
• The cover shifts part of the cold-chain risk conversation from shipper to intermediary, which may influence how forwarders price pharma and perishable logistics contracts.
• Underwriters entering this niche implicitly acknowledge that schedule volatility and thermal failure rates have become recurring, quantifiable costs rather than exceptional events.

The Loadstar's report did not detail pricing, coverage limits or the underwriter behind the product at the time of publication.

For an industry that has watched reliability metrics swing sharply through successive supply-chain disruptions, the arrival of delay- and temperature-specific cover for intermediaries suggests insurers now consider those risks stable enough to underwrite at scale.