How IoT brings food safety and eliminates waste in the food supply chain

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With the right IoT solutions, there is an opportunity to make food safety and food waste prevention functions more collaborative.

In most food retail companies, food safety and loss prevention are not linked in the organizational hierarchy. Food safety typically reports to the risk or compliance department, while loss prevention programs are managed by operations, legal, or human resources. They are separated because their key metrics and goals seem to be at odds with each other. On the food safety side, the goal is to deliver the safest, highest quality products. This creates incentives for over-cautious choices, sometimes resulting in thousands of pounds of food being wasted unnecessarily. On the loss prevention side, the primary goal is to identify any loss of profit margins as part of the retailer’s larger overall loss-making programs. Loss prevention professionals need solutions that help them make informed decisions to save money and reduce waste.

Another goal is to avoid the risk of food being contaminated by e.g. B. germs are contaminated.

Management fears that when food safety and loss prevention are in the same department, either profitability or safety will be the priority and the other department will be hurt by a loss of focus. However, with the right Internet of Things (IoT) solutions, there is an opportunity to transform the food safety and loss prevention (and even quality and facilities) functions into better collaboration through shared goals and an understanding of the underlying synergies.

Total Retail Losses

To see the possibilities for closer collaboration between food safety and loss prevention, it is helpful to understand the concept of total retail losses. A study from 2020 dealt with the monitoring of food losses in the food trade.

Before the concept of total loss was introduced to retail, loss prevention professionals viewed loss through the lens of fraud – individuals and salespeople stealing product from stores. The concept of total loss in retail takes a more holistic perspective and looks at total loss of profit margin and not just fraud. From this perspective, non-malicious sources of loss such as spoilage, damage and waste are also considered – all considerations that a lack of food safety can generate.

Reducing waste through digital transformation of food safety

A digital food safety program or an IoT sensing and monitoring program is related to a product loss prevention strategy as they provide early warning systems and prescriptive workflows that allow frontline workers to intervene before a product is lost. Sensors generate critical readings from the physical world and digitize them so they can be processed in the digital world. The spectrum of what can be captured is wide – pressure, CO₂, oxygen, movement, volume, shelf availability, temperature, humidity, traffic, etc.

What do you do with all that telemetry data? The idea is to collect all of these data points and then use them to create tangible value in the context of the retail business. Combined with prescriptive analytics, the IoT can identify what needs to be done and guide people in the physical world on what to do to optimize the outcome.

When you have visibility into the environmental status of your physical assets – freezers, refrigerators, promotional fridges, etc. – and take automatic corrective action, you waste less power, time and product when anomalies occur. Digitizing food safety operations drives positive outcomes for loss prevention programs through less waste and loss.

Maximizing the operational efficiencies of assets

With the insights and guidance gleaned from the telemetry data, asset operators are able to improve their operational efficiencies. Minimizing workload and improving employee retention are the natural results of eliminating manual metric verification. Predictive maintenance is improved because plant personnel are notified when equipment fails before it breaks.

IoT platforms can also be connected to third-party energy management services and building management systems to give operators integrated visibility and alarm control of their assets. Connected assets enable managers to make more informed decisions and allocate maintenance resources more efficiently.

Qualitätskontrolle und Markenschutz

Effective quality control goes beyond food safety and considers how the products taste and how they are presented to the consumer. No consumer will pick up a brown banana or an ice cream packet with freezer burn on the outside, even if the product is perfectly safe to consume. In particular, when ice cream thaws and thaws again, the container may look perfect on the outside and the product is safe to consume, but the inside is crystallized, giving the consumer an inferior experience.

Integrated IoT contributes to quality control and brand protection by enabling continuous monitoring – from production to warehousing and transport to shelf life of the product. From a brand protection standpoint, this continuous detection and proactive action protects both the product brand and the retail brand, thereby securing the sale of the product.

The functions of food safety, quality control, facility management and loss prevention can be made more efficient in invisible ways. Internal politics and blind spots can be overcome when operators recognize common goals and invest in the technologies that help them achieve their common goals. With an overall view of retail losses, loss prevention can support the programs of other operational functions and recognize that a win for food safety, quality control or facilities translates into higher profits in the long run.

Summary

The use of IoT in the food and beverage industry reduces the likelihood of foodborne illness. A variety of sensors are used to monitor production status and shipping time. A key benefit of adopting the IoT is reducing food spoilage, with temperature management playing a key role. IoT sensors track temperature in real-time, allowing businesses to closely monitor food safety. If a storage or shipping container exceeds or falls below a certain temperature threshold, the sensors can alert management. This means that measures can be taken before the products are affected.