Keeping things cool & cold chain

Every time the door to a milk cooler or freezer does not close properly, an alarm goes off on a computer screen in a control building in Odense, Denmark, thanks to an IoT Monitoring solution. The vendor provides continually-supervised alarm equipment for refrigerating units, with 16 operators responding to alarms. These operators, when notified of a problem, will contact store employees or specialists and provide instruction to ensure frozen foods do not go bad.

The alarms go off approximately 140,000 times per year, or roughly 400 alarms in a 24-hour period. When an alarm sounds, there is a limited amount of time to act before dairy products or frozen good go to waste. This type of waste can quickly start to cost a supermarket a great deal of money, according to the vendor.

The company claims it provides an insurance-like service for its customers, giving them the ability to maintain the strict standards set by the Danish authorities regarding the sale of food products.

A gateway to food monitoring

A supermarket’s cooling and freezing department is controlled by CTI, or HVAC systems, which insure the maintaining of a specific temperature without relying on store employees.

The vendor provides the infrastructure that makes it possible to communicate with the company’s central server. The core of the infrastructure, in the form of a single box, is provided by an industrial gateway solution.

 “In our solution, the IT department doesn’t have to go in and configure or maintain anything, they just have to give us permission to make a VPN tunnel coming out from their network. There is only one way that information goes, and that is out; no one else has access to our network, which is completely secure, except for these pre-defined IP addresses from the wireless network that connects back to our server via the VP tunnel.”

How it happened, where it is now

The high degree of security was one of the reasons why the company decided to start working with an IOT provider, a cold Chain Monitoring service provider according to the company. At the time, he and his colleagues were struggling to switch over from ADSL modems to digital IP technology. It was a challenge to get the wireless gateways to communicate with CTI and HVAC systems, but the questions raised by IP technology were significant. Today, ten years later, there is a SiteManager in over 1,500 stores across Denmark. This box can be found in every single store, and is serially connected with a Danfoss gateway, which wirelessly collects the data from the store’s equipment.