How Real Time Monitoring Can Improve Food Safety

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Nitin Dahad
Nitin Dahad
12/16/2013

Food is an essence of life and it is no surprise therefore that food safety and security are of major concern globally. In some countries, food wastage is commonplace because of issues in the supply chain. Even the World Bank has a Global Food Safety Partnership (GFSP) division, which holds an annual conference supported by over 70 countries, private companies, international organizations, trade associations, academic institutions, and non-governmental groups.

According to the GFSP, there is an ongoing world food safety problem that threatens every economy and food company, challenging governmental regulatory authorities, sickening millions of people each year, introducing barriers to trade, and hurting corporate bottom lines. According to the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), "We live in a world where confidence is a key pillar of the global food system – and consumer expectations for food safety are high." Hence it is keen to see a global supply chain operate to ensure that food products are safe for consumption.

This is where technology can certainly help enhance food safety. In the USA, the Food Marketing Institute (FMI) is encouraging its membership of 40,000 food retailers and 25,000 pharmacies to embrace traceability technology, since safeguarding the nation’s food safety is its number one priority. According to the institute’s vice president, "At FMI, we are working to help our members protect their customers and employees, meet all federal and state regulatory mandates, safeguard their brands, and reduce financial risk. Traceability is increasingly important to everyone in the food industry, and retail is no exception."

One aspect of enabling confidence in the food supply chain that technology can help with is in temperature monitoring. By using wireless temperature sensors in cold chain transport and storage, it is possible using communications technology to obtain temperature data in real time. Dyzle has been providing the technology and the cloud based platform to the food industry for a while, to help monitor real-time data on the food and also enable energy saving.

An example of this is at Kruidenier Foodservices in the Netherlands, whose refrigeration units and cold storage trucks are fitted with remote sensors from Dyzle. These monitor the storage areas as well as core temperature of the products themselves. The temperature readings and precise locations of the cold storage trucks are transmitted via remote GPRS communication to a central point – the online personal dashboard – where they are all registered.

This ensures full traceability and customers can see whether the temperature of, say, dairy products has fallen under seven degrees during storage at the premises or during transport. The system provides perfect substantiation when it comes to the quality assurance that is so important to certification.

In this example, a by-product for the food company was in enabling energy savings. The remote monitoring allows them to keep a close eye on the energy consumption of all their cold stores. This parameter is also shown in the personal dashboard available via the cloud, indicating if the unit is working optimally, and allowing them to take corrective action if required.

The key to real-time monitoring of variables such as temperature and energy consumption is not just to gather data – that is probably the easy part as technology today is available to provide this. The more important part is in interpreting the data and providing real-time alerts in case excursions occur. This is where solutions like online personal dashboards with some ‘intelligence’ or expertise to analyze the data and present relevant information is really important.

This is an important benefit of Dyzle’s online platform – it is the result of customers’ inputs and the development team’s expertise built up over a decade, in understanding what data customers need from their cold chain and what that data means. While it is complex and fully scalable at the back-end, it is made extremely simple to use as far as the customer is concerned.

In the food industry, the ability to provide to use technology such as remote real-time temperature monitoring with some ‘intelligence’ to enable complete end-to-end visibility of the cold chain can go a long way towards meeting the agenda of ensuring confidence in food safety and security.

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