How Smart Sensors Can Reduce Food Waste in the Retail Supply Chain

White Paper Overview

Every year, we waste enormous amounts of food – estimated at 1.6 billion tons annually according to Boston Consulting Group. There are many causes for these losses, but one significant problem is refrigeration failings: in the supply chain, in food production outlets, and in retail stores.

The worst case scenario for a supermarket or café manager would be to open up in the morning, and discover that an overnight failure has caused all the valuable frozen food to defrost, and that it must be thrown away. A better solution is to use automated sensors, connected to a central network, which can raise the alarm when a problem occurs. Such sensors can also be useful to provide evidence that food has been stored and transported safely – for example, the shipping company Maersk Line has equipped all of its 270,000 refrigerated containers with technology to record location, temperature, humidity and more. For many supermarkets, adding such sensors is not straightforward. Their refrigeration equipment typically has a long service life, so replacing it with new models is not economical. Fitting sensors and monitoring to the existing systems can be complicated and expensive, particularly where extra cabling is needed, which may cost several times the price of the actual monitoring hardware.

In this white paper, explore a solution based around DeviceOn Module, which is a smart, wireless, out of the box sensor connectivity solution that solves challenges facing the retail supply chain.