Temperature monitoring of food is an effective method to keep food safety and to maintain the integrity of the cold chain and it is necessary to implement temperature monitoring of chilled food in the cold chain. Nowadays, the situation of temperature management in the course of food transportation is not satisfactory, and the products which customers received always cannot reach what they expected. The only way to solve this problem is to implement temperature monitoring with time-temperature indicator. The necessity and foreground of the temperature legislation, the importance, theory and the application in the refrigerated transport of temperature monitoring were reviewed in this paper. The principle of some overseas timetemperature indicator was also introduced.