To ensure the quality and safety, and extend storage and shelf life of horticultural products across the entire coldchain, a critical step in the postharvest cold chain is rapid precooling after harvest to remove field heat. This work established a threedimensional mathematical model of airinflow and heat transfer for analyzing the aerodynamic and thermal forcedconvection cooling of vented packages simultaneously. A direct model that uses the explicit geometry of stacked products in boxes was developed earlier and was used to study the local and average airinflow through stacks of horticultural products (the package wall, trays and apples). This study is based on an existing twolayer corrugated box for precooling fresh apples. We accounted for the heat of respiration, transpiration, condensation and convective heat flow inside the produce zone. The results show that a reasonable increasing cooling rate and uniformity are obtained with an increase in airinflow velocity to 2.5m/s; any further increase in airinflow velocity simply wastes energy because it leads to a relatively low increase in cooling rate and uniformity. The model was verified by comparing its results to those of experiments. The predicted results were consistent with the measured results. The maximum temperature deviation was less than 1.5℃, and the maximum root mean square error and average relative error for produce temperature were 1.179℃ and 13.6%, respectively. This research thus provides a reliable theoretical basis for improving air-inflow and produce-temperature uniformity and minimizing energy consumption during forcedconvection cooling of produce.