Ever wonder how those strawberries you're about to buy got to the store? Or more importantly, what happened to the fruit during shipment?

PakSense, a Boise technology firm, has developed a way for those in the food business to monitor their produce, meat and other products in transit with Smart Labels, electronic sensors stuffed into an adhesive label about the size of a sugar packet.

The labels, which can stick to a cardboard box or crate, track the temperature every five minutes for up to four weeks and transfer that information to a computer. Sysco Food Services of Idaho, which distributes food to local restaurants, hospitals, schools and hotels, is testing the technology and has found it useful in the field.

"For us, it's important, because we want to make sure we're providing the best quality products to our customers," said Terry Reynolds, vice president of merchandising and marketing at Sysco Idaho. "By maintaining and controlling the temperature of the food, you can make sure it is not going to be in jeopardy of shortening its shelf life."

The Smart Labels are different from radio-frequency identification, or RFID, tags that some manufacturers and retailers like Wal-Mart Stores Inc. use. Those tags are used to help Wal-Mart track what items it needs to restock on its shelves.

PakSense Smart Labels are different because the labels are able to record more than just the product's serial number, company officials said. It can track the temperature surrounding the product. The reaction to the new label from the food industry has been overwhelming, said David Baldwin, vice president of sales and marketing for PakSense.

PakSense is testing the technology locally with Sysco Idaho, but several other companies already have shown interest in using the labels, including a national supermarket chain, a worldwide banana supplier, a European grocery chain and a couple of food distribution businesses, Baldwin said. He declined to disclose the names of the interested companies.

The idea for the Smart Labels started when Tom Jensen, the founder of PakSense, was on an airplane in 2002. He sat next to an executive from a Midwestern meat packing plant who complained to Jensen that there was no quick and easy way for him to track the temperature of his beef in transit.

So Jensen, who was working as a product design consultant in the tech industry at the time, developed a rough prototype that he eventually turned into PakSense's TTi Smart Label. (TTi stands for time/temperature integration.)

Jensen, who now has several patents pending on the technology, founded PakSense in 2004 to develop more of these labels. He brought on a management team last year to help run the company and sell the product worldwide, and his technology startup has grown to eight employees.

The field trials with Sysco Idaho started about three weeks ago, and the local food distributor already has embraced the technology.

Before using PakSense Smart Labels, Sysco relied on data recorders that were stored on each shipping truck. After a shipment, the company would open the recorder and take out a sheet of paper from inside the recorder that tracked the temperature trends during travel.

But the recorder does not say at what time of day the temperature rose or dropped, said Keith Hahn, a produce category manager at Sysco Idaho. "It is more a measure of a trend," he said of the recorder. "You can see it over the course of a day."

The PakSense label, however, lets the food distributors know immediately whether mushrooms, tomatoes or lettuce are fresh when they get off the truck because each label has three lights -- over temp, under temp and OK. One of the lights will be lit depending on what the temperatures were during shipment.

Right now, Sysco is testing the labels on the shipments it gets from producers, rather than the truckloads it takes to retailers in the area. If the PakSense label says a product is no longer fresh when it shows up at the Sysco warehouse, Sysco officials can save time and money by sending the food back to the producer immediately instead of shipping it on to its customers.

Sysco also can download data from the label into a spreadsheet on the computer to find out exactly what time of day the produce went bad. The label records the temperature every five minutes.

PakSense is making hundreds of labels a month now and selling them for between $10 to $12 each. But the company hopes to bring that price down as it continues to ramp up production to make thousands of labels in the next few months, said Eric Larson, the company's president and chief executive officer.

PakSense makes its labels locally, buying circuit boards from companies in Boise and then hiring local manufacturers to assemble the labels, Baldwin said.

"We are keeping it a local, Boise company," Baldwin said. "This is the plan." In the future, Jensen and his management team can see the label being used to ship pharmaceuticals, chemicals and other products.

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