Any company in charge of transporting goods from point A to point B plays a vital role for end users or wholesalers receiving the product. Losing items during transport is undesirable for all parties involved. Frustration ensues and money is lost. Some industries have higher standards than others, requiring the product to arrive at the correct destination and at specific temperatures. This is referred to as a cold chain. Many cold chain distributors have some type of system in place to track products on the road, but not many know the condition they will arrive in.
How Much Are You Wasting?
When I say waste, I don’t just mean money, I mean wasted product. One of the most well-known cold chains is the transportation of food and beverage. If you're shipping a truckload of produce, getting it to the right grocery store doesn’t matter if the cooler failed and everything spoiled. The grocery store would have little to no produce to sell over the next week. The domino effect following a truckload of spoiled food can ultimately hurt your relationship with that store.
Increase Your ROI by Investing in AirFinder Everywhere
- Loss Prevention. Reduce the amount of loss that occurs during the supply chain process
- Location Coverage. AirFinder Everywhere uses a combination of GPS, Cellular, and WiFi to determine location everywhere
- Security Alerts. Know when a delay in shipment has occurred so the problem can be addressed immediately.
What Impact Does Food Wasting Have on the Environment?
When food is wasted, all the effort that goes into growing the food and transporting food is wasted. Even more, wasted food adds to landfills and pollutes the earth. World Wild Life says, “6%-8% of all human-caused greenhouse gas emissions could be reduced if we stop wasting food.” The waste reduction comes from more than just households wasting food; it comes from trucks having to dispose of food spoiled during transportation.
How Do You Reduce Wasted Food?
One way would be to get the best cooler for your trucks transporting sensitive food items, but even that has a chance of failing. There’s only so much you can do to prevent the failure of a truck cooler, but you can use technology to tell you when the cooler fails. IoT technology has made advancements to include temperature sensors to help when these unfortunate situations occur.
Our asset tracking system, AirFinder, has been advanced to do more than just track location; our engineers have built sensors into the tags that monitor the environment. These sensors monitor shock and temperature. On our UI, you can program the tags to alert you when the temperature on a truck falls into a specific range, indicating to you the cooler has either failed or isn’t working properly. This notification can give you the time you need to fix the problem so the food doesn’t go bad and gets wasted.
Take Full Control of Your Cold Supply Chain
Tracking the location of your pallets in transport isn’t enough. Using an IoT tracking system with sensors to monitor the temperature to ensure sensitive food items don’t go bad during transport.
So many companies have done everything they can to become more sustainable. Some are doing it by means of packaging while others are looking to reduce waste. At Link Labs, we are doing everything we can to make our company and others more sustainable. To learn more about our efforts, reach out to our team!