"Intelleflex honored as a "Top Green Provider"
Intelleflex provides on-demand data visibility for partner solutions that enhance sustainability and reduce waste throughout the cold supply chain. With the cost of annual food waste totaling approximately $35 billion globally -- one-third of gross production value -- Intelleflex-based solutions help reduce food waste by enabling cold chain suppliers to improve the delivered freshness of perishable foods to retailers by ensuring that those foods have sufficient remaining shelf life -- reducing or eliminating the losses of entire pallet loads of perishables and maximizing delivered yield.
Last year, Intelleflex and ProWare Services, conducted a case study with an international berry grower that showed how adopting Intelleflex's on-demand RFID temperature monitoring products provided suppliers with actionable data to reduce food waste and help minimize environmental impact associated with that waste. The wireless access to the pallet-level temperature data, based on EPC and ISO standards, enables improved workflow and reduced labor in managing product quality. Through pallet-level temperature monitoring, Intelleflex systems improved delivered quality from the field to the pack house, in the pre-cool phase, and from pack house to retail distribution through the use of prioritized routing. The actionable data captured by Intelleflex temperature-monitoring devices enabled the berry grower to build pallets of uniform berry quality, prioritize shipments, and to quickly reroute perishables based on their relative remaining shelf life.
By wasting less and optimizing logistics operations, Intelleflex products can prevent a series of negative impacts on the environment. According to the United Nations Environment Program, "wasting food is not only an inefficient use of ecosystem services [like water] and of the fossil fuel-based resources that go into producing them, but also a significant contributor to global warming. In the USA, organic waste is the second highest component of landfills, which are the largest source of methane emissions." By helping to maximize delivered yield, Intelleflex enables producers and suppliers to feed more people with the same quantity of food originally produced, while also reducing the use of water, pesticide, fertilizer and fuel that would otherwise be required to increase production. Additionally, growers waste fewer natural resources by reducing supply chain inefficiencies.
"Sustainability in the supply chain continues to evolve as more companies recognize the necessity for environmental conservation, while new technologies are making it easier to adopt and quantify sustainable practices," noted Lara L. Sowinski, editor-in-chief at Food Logistics, the only publication dedicated exclusively to the grocery and food service distribution supply chain. "The companies on this year's list have proven that making a commitment to sustainability in their operations not only delivers a measurable return on investment, but gives them a competitive advantage in the marketplace and in the eyes of their customers."
"It's a great honor to be recognized by Food Logistics as a Top Green Provider and receive acknowledgment that on-demand, actionable data can help reduce waste and improve resource utilization throughout the cold chain," said Peter Mehring, president and CEO, Intelleflex. "Working with our partners, we are enabling cold chain suppliers to capture and share actionable data about the condition of fresh food -- from the field to the retailer -- helping them maximize delivered yield and quality while minimizing the impact on the environment."
The benefits of actionable data in the supply chain have also been recognized by the insurance industry. The Hartford Financial Services Group, a leading provider of insurance and wealth management services for millions of consumers and businesses worldwide, which has a strategic alliance with Intelleflex, has also been recognized for its sustainability efforts. The Hartford was recognized in 2011 by Newsweek Magazine as the 12th greenest company in America, ahead of all other financial services companies. The company has also been named to the Carbon Disclosure Project's Carbon Disclosure Leadership Index for the last four years in a row and to the Environmental Protection Agency's EPA Green Power Partnership Top Partner rankings (Fortune 500(R) Partner category, 2012). More information on The Hartford's commitment to sustainability and environmental stewardship is available in the company's Statement on Climate Change and Sustainability Report.
Source: www.marketwatch.com