If you store vaccines, biologics or temperature-sensitive food, you've probably been asked for your Mean Kinetic Temperature — or MKT. It sounds like a simple average, but it isn't, and the difference is exactly why regulators ask for it.
Why a plain average is misleading
Imagine a fridge that mostly sits at 5 °C (41 °F) but spiked to 20 °C (68 °F) for two hours during a power blip. Averaged over a month, those two hours barely move the number — the simple average still looks safe. But chemical degradation doesn't work on a linear average. Reaction rates rise exponentially with temperature, so that short hot excursion did far more damage than the average suggests.
What MKT actually measures
Mean Kinetic Temperature answers a better question: "What single, steady temperature would have caused the same total amount of degradation as this varying real-world history?" It uses the Arrhenius equation to weight hotter readings exponentially more than cooler ones. The result is a single temperature value that honestly reflects the thermal stress your product experienced — which is why it's the standard for proving cold-chain safety to the FDA, Health Canada and CDC/VFC programs.
MKT in the real world
- Pharmacy & vaccines: proves a fridge stayed within its safe envelope even if the door was opened hundreds of times.
- Transport & logistics: a transit MKT report covers a shipment from departure to delivery — and flags any gaps in wireless coverage along the way (MKT reliability).
- Food storage: backs up HACCP records with a defensible thermal-stress score, not just a spreadsheet of numbers.
How MaxLinc calculates it for you
You don't run the Arrhenius math by hand. MaxLinc loggers record temperature continuously, and the cloud platform computes MKT automatically over any date range, alongside min/max/average, peak-point and detailed read-out reports. When an auditor asks, you export a clean, signature-ready PDF in one click — no formulas, no manual entry.
See it in action
MKT is one of several advanced reports built into the platform. See how it protects medical inventory on our clinical & healthcare page, read the practical playbook for vaccine fridge monitoring, or choose a logger to start building an audit-ready record.