Cold-Chain Management for Safety, Profitability, or Both?
It’s been an interesting year for CLS, closely approaching our one year anniversary and dozens of great projects completed. That said, there is one we are still struggling to fully comprehend: Cold-Chain Management.
We've been working with the industry’s largest OEMs and some of the nation’s largest refrigerated fleets to try and find the ideal balance between optimal control (AKA: expensive as hell) vs. return on investment. The truth is, our research shows varying degrees of opportunity to improve food safety from farm to fork. When CLS constructed the value-chain for the typical food distributor we found that a significant amount of the risk happens after the food leaves the truck, at the customer’s location. We are working towards the ability to have a truly integrated end-to-end cold-chain program. The struggle is not the availability of technology but who is going to pay for it. We believe the opportunity for a major shift in this technology category exists.
The way I see it is, who ultimately wants this information of food temperatures while in transit and storage... It’s the consumer. CLS is working toward a foodLabs program that will allow the typical restaurant patron to track the food they are buying before they eat it. Imagine if when you walked into the new steakhouse up the street that each item on the menu had a QR code (or an even cooler NFC tag) that you could scan and get information about the food you’re eating, along with when it was produced, when it was transported, at what temperatures it was kept, along with the typical nutrition information that we both love and hate to see. We call it "My Food Chain,” and we believe it will change the way America thinks about food safety. The costs in this model shift from hardware and subscriptions to Big Data, meaning, what can the information be used for? Advertising, health insurance, marketing... anything.
The concept is new, but we believe the value is highest for those who ultimately benefit the most. YOU.
Stay tuned for more news on "My Food Chain.”
