Intelleflex provides monitoring and tracking solutions using battery assisted passive (BAP) RFID technology. An RFID system uses small tags to identify and track things and the Intelleflex solution also adds sensor capabilities to monitor temperatures and other conditions. The produce industry has traditionally used this technology to track product throughout the cold chain. The advantages of the BAP system that Intelleflex offers, in addition to the sensor capabilities, are cost and accuracy. Compared to older, passive systems, the BAP system allows for greater range and data capabilities, and compared to active systems, it is more cost-effective and can thus be deployed widely throughout the shipping process. Because of these advantages, tags can be placed inside individual pallets and the temperature and relative shelf-life of produce can be tracked at the individual pallet level.
The ability to accurately measure the temperature of individual pallets makes the system attractive to growers who wish to reduce the amount of produce wasted through processing, precool and shipping.
“What we're able to do is evaluate the relative quality and freshness of the product,” says Kevin Payne of Intelleflex.
“We found that temperature variation is significant, even within a single packing house,” he adds, “and that can be due to when the fruit is picked, how it's shipped and where it's stored. The resulting temperature variation can cause significant aging in the field before the product even reaches the packing house. Every hour the produce spends above 70 degrees, it ages about one day. So if it sits for four hours and the temperature is above 70 degrees before it gets to the packing house, it may have aged up to four days.”That can lead to variations in freshness inside a single freight container. If temperature and freshness is not monitored on a pallet level, the result could be mistakes when evaluating produce quality.
“If the retailer pulls one pallet from a truck, they'll assume the entire trailer is like that, and if it's not fresh, they'll reject the entire truck,” he says.
In such a case, the grower eats the cost of wasted produce. What pallet-level monitoring allows is a shipping system with more uniformity of freshness.
“What we enable growers to do is, instead of visual inspection, know the shelf-life based on a temperature history so pallets can be built in ways that every pallet in a shipment has the same shelf-life.”
Such a system would allow a grower to ship produce with the longest remaining shelf-life to destinations which take longer to reach.
Payne notes that, although the system has attracted interest from growers, it's also appealing to the food service industry, since better monitoring of produce freshness ensures quality products for their customers.
And it's also led to partnerships with the insurance industry.
“We recently partnered with The Hartford where we're working to help reduce insurance rates for those who insure their produce,” he says.
The aim is to better track produce, and in that way reduce loss due to spoilage on insured shipments. With fewer losses, claims and rates may go down.
Finally, Payne notes that the effort to better track food shipments can serve a broader goal.
“With more people on earth, we run into the problem of how to feed so many people. One way is to just grow more food, but another thing that can be done is to manage food shipments more efficiently. A large percentage of the food currently grown is wasted, and if we can reduce that waste, it would go a long way toward feeding the world's population.”
For more information:
Kevin Payne
Intelleflex
Tel: +1 408-200-6567
Mob: +1 408-910-1726
kpayne@intelleflex.com
www.intelleflex.com