Bespoke IoT Temperature Monitoring Solution for Bidfood
IoT Temperature Monitoring Solution - Giving Peace of Mind with Real-time Alerts
The Client
Bidfood is a full-service food wholesaler supplying a full range of fresh, frozen, and ambient food, non-alcoholic beverages as well as non-food consumables to the New Zealand hospitality and foodservice operators.
Operating nationwide with over 2,200 staff and 17 regional locations, in both Urban centres and regional towns. Bidfood’s can been seen, across New Zealand when you are out and about, with over 450 trucks on the road every day, delivering their range of over 20,000 different products to customers country wide.
Bidfood is passionate about the service they provide, and their vision is “to provide everything our customers need to produce culinary magic and realise their vision on the plate.”
Customer Problem
Bidfood needed to find a more efficient way, in real-time, to precisely monitor the product temperature in their refrigerated trucks. Freshness and food quality are paramount and required manual checking and recording of temperatures. The system was labour intensive, manual, and not reliable.
Trucks were loaded on Friday afternoons and stayed on power over the weekend for delivery first thing Monday morning. If the refrigerator was left off, or there was a power failure, the product was at risk of being spoiled. This meant that approximately $35,000.00 (per truck), worth of product would need to be written off come Monday morning. Also of large concern, and present challenges to be managed, are hot summers. To help mitigate this risk, staff would regularly go onsite specifically to check the trucks over the course of the weekend, resulting in additional labour costs with over time and standby allowances.
During deliveries, the temperature of the trucks naturally increased with the opening and closing of the doors. This raised the risk of product spoilage. To avoid this, and comply with food safety regulations, the driver would manually check and record temperatures at each delivery stop. Thus, increasing the time needed between stops to take manual recorded temperatures. As well as the concern for truck refrigeration doors being left open for too long. And being able to be alerted when the delivery team had left the door open, or not latched the door correctly.
With the use of manual checks, these reports would still need to be administrated and compiled manually by staff and then sent to the departments for auditing purpose.
Solution
Autom8 recommended a non-wired, IoT network device, to monitor temperature fluctuation in Realtime, with live alerts, for when there was a temperature threshold breach. Added to this solution was automated reporting for audit purposes. This would check and record the temperatures hourly and record the data. This audit report is sent weekly to the teams for review. By automating this report, it improves accuracy and saves time by reducing the need to do this task manually.
The IoT Temperature Solution Proof of Concept (POC) was run over the course of a few of months to test and confirm the correct solution with the Bidfood team.
The battery powered IoT devices were fitted to the cargo areas of the trucks. This meant that it was not reliant on the trucks power and would be more robust. The device battery lasts for approximately 5 years.
Realtime Dashboard, data and alerts are available to be viewed on mobile apps on: IOS, Android smartphones, as well as Web based dashboards on their computers and/or Tablets, by Maintenance and Health & Safety teams. The alerts and reports are also available via email to the teams. The solution allows the supervisor or maintenance person to be notified via the app or email, outside of working hours.
Weekly and Monthly audit reports mean Temperatures recorded on specific days and times were accessible at any given time. Making auditing and reporting, accurate, less resource heavy and always available to the teams.
Results
The Bidfood IoT devices have allowed the maintenance/Food and Beverage teams to proactively manage their stock temperature levels, as well as have the reporting of that data automated, making auditing, simpler for the company. Avoiding stock write-off’s, being lost due to malfunctioning of equipment.
Staff can spend more time on other key operational tasks and the company has a reduction on resources across manually taking temperatures, capturing, recording and reporting of this data. The OCH IoT temperature solution comes with peace of mind for when the team are clocked out, in a simple, smart solution.
Contact us today to start your automation journey and peace of mind, cost saving solutions
