Mid-market frozen seafood importers leave $400K–$1.5M of recoverable cargo losses on the table every year. Your insurer denied them. Your carrier, drayage, and coldstore liability sides are still wide open.
No data from you required. Built from public customs, court, and disruption data.
Standard marine cargo insurance only pays under narrow trigger conditions — the Institute Frozen Food Cargo Clauses A, B, and C — that most cold-chain failures fail to meet. Inherent vice exclusions. Continuous-breakdown thresholds. Pre-shipment condition disputes. Denial rates run high, and lowball settlements are routine.
The catch: when the insurer says no, three other parties remain liable under federal statute — and the deadlines on those tracks are quietly running out.
Marine cargo insurance under Institute Clauses A/B/C. Capped, slow, denied frequently on inherent-vice or continuous-breakdown grounds. This is where most importers stop.
46 USC §30701. The ocean carrier's liability for cargo damage during voyage. $500/package cap, but recoverable in parallel with the insurer claim.
49 USC §14706. Inland trucking carriers. The deadline runs from the date of denial of a written claim — and almost no importer files within nine months. This is where the most money is left behind.
49 USC §80101. The coldstore's duty of care under the federal warehousing statute. Less commonly pursued, often the differentiator on multi-defendant losses.
Every disruption event below generated a class of denied or unfiled claims. The 9-month Carmack window on 2024–25 losses is closing right now — and once it expires, the recovery is gone.
Houthi attacks forced carriers around the Cape of Good Hope. Europe/Asia–US lanes added 10–14 days transit. Frozen product spec compliance failed on extended voyages.
East Coast reefer rerouting. Demurrage and storage extensions on cargo that couldn't move.
Transit-slot bidding pushed reefer cargo into longer transshipment chains, extending exposure to temperature variance.
Insufficient terminal plug capacity caused yard-side reefer outages. Many failures undocumented in carrier event logs.
No. Thaw Claim is a strategy and documentation service. We build filing-ready recovery packages that your in-house or external counsel files. We do not provide legal advice and we do not file claims on your behalf.
FourKites and Project44 are visibility platforms that prevent and detect losses in-motion for carriers and large shippers. Thaw Claim recovers money from losses that already happened and already got denied — on behalf of the importer, not the carrier. They work with real-time sensor data; we work with your bill of lading and the four federal statutes that say someone owes you money.
The $5,000 monthly retainer covers the work that produces value whether or not a specific claim recovers — the readiness framework, the reporting, the deadline tracking. The 15% contingency aligns us on the upside. Pure contingency would force us to cherry-pick only the largest, easiest claims, which leaves money on the table.
The Carmack Amendment (49 USC §14706) gives a claimant nine months from the date of written claim denial to file suit against an inland motor carrier. The catch: most importers don't realize the clock starts at denial, not at loss. A claim denied in mid-2024 has its window expiring this summer. Once that window closes, the recovery is permanently gone.
You'll receive a personalized 7-page PDF within 48 hours. It models your annual cold-chain exposure based on public customs and disruption data, identifies which of the four recovery tracks apply to your profile, and includes any public litigation signal we found. There's no obligation to follow up — but if it makes sense, you can book a 30-minute call to discuss next steps.