IoT for cold chain monitoring

An assured quality standard is an absolute necessity in the food industry. Permanent monitoring of environmental conditions plays a major role in quality assurance because even small deviations could result in faster deterioration of goods and loss of sales.

Initial situation:

As a producer of lebkuchen, a gingerbread specialty from Nuremberg, Witte Spezialitäten faces the challenge of generating all its sales within the limited period around Christmas. This is backed by a high quality claim. To produce the goods in an economically viable way and then sell them, it is important to keep waste low.

A significant factor in this is the closely meshed monitoring of the environmental conditions and reliable coverage of large halls and rooms. Influencing factors, such as temperature and humidity changes, must be detected and analyzed quickly.

Solution: 

To transmit environmental data quickly and precisely and to read it, PixelMechanics had sensors equipped with mioty^® technology installed in the large warehouses and retail outlets for Witte Spezialitäten. The hardware for this was provided by the project partner BehrTech.

For this, one mioty^® base station and various sensors were installed at each Witte Spezialitäten location. Installation and configuration were completed within one day.

The sensors acquire both the temperature and moisture data, transferring the data every 75 seconds via the mioty^® network to the PixelMechanics IoT platform. The data are then visualized on a user-friendly dashboard as knowledge that can be used to take action. Warning messages are also output immediately if values deviate from the optimum range.

Benefits:

The knowledge gained enables analysis of the influencing factors such as opening/closing doors, volume of shoppers, or heating intervals in real time so that proactive decisions can be made. That improves cold chain monitoring and control and, if all goes well, it reduces costs and increases quality.

A further step may be to network production to enable cost-reducing and quality-boosting measures to be taken. Since mioty^® is highly scalable and simple to integrate into the existing infrastructure, there is nothing standing in the way of further industrial IoT cases, including condition-based applications, smart monitoring, and predictive maintenance.