In our last article, we presented our vision for our OEM approach: integrating our unique technology tailored to customers’ needs. But let’s talk about an actual OEM project we’ve been working on!
For a few months now we’ve been working on retail and food industries, especially on how to manage products freshness during their whole retail journey, from the place they are collected to retailers’. Lack of freshness leads to several problems from product waste for supermarkets to customer dissatisfaction and bad experience. Indeed, poor quality and bad freshness will have repercussions to retailers’ profits and customers’ loyalty as disappointed clients will change their shopping habits in favor of competitors, and without warning the retailer of the product’s issue in most cases.
So how to address freshness problems?
Temperature recorders adapted to sanitary norms and cold rooms are a must to respect states and health authorities’ regulations all along the cold chain and food processes in the agri-food industry.
But if we take a look at the supply chain of fresh goods, specifically meat and fishes, one can observe that there is no information about the freshness of the product at the delivery to the retailers. So how can we be sure that the products were well packaged? What if a part of the loads had packaging failure and were exposed to ambient air and had developed bacteria? Also, how to develop a portable and “quick-reading” device that will not add delays during the logistics chain process? Our new OEM project Freshsense aims to solve these different issues, to guarantee goods’ freshness during their whole supply chain. More than only defining cold chain breaks, Freshsense analyzes the whole food’s state of the product to establish its quality, by sampling and correlating environmental data.
Freshsense, to maximize goods' freshness in retail industry
To do so we have gathered our state-of-the-art multi-sensor modules knowledge by combining different electrochemical, digital and MOX sensors to create a portable device equipped with a very-low power air pump to analyze the air within the products’ packages. Thanks to our sensors fusion technology, our innovation ensures the organoleptic qualities of products through the innovative ellona’s AI algorithm embedded that allows a fast and robust local analysis. The device first analyzes the ambient air to get a clean data base for correlation, then acquires a sample from the package in order to perform the freshness analysis. The Freshsense technology will not only determine the proper application of hygiene standards but also give retailers the assurance of well packaged products to maximize customers’ experience and achieve quality performances.
Freshsense is at the ramp-up of the large-scale production. You can have a sneak peek on the device and discover more about how we will deploy this product in the future by meeting our OEM director Bruno Franciscatto this week at the CES 2022 exhibtion in Las Vegas.