Backbone Magazine - The story behind bruised produce
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The story behind bruised produce
New gadgets from Branham Up and Comer, Sensor Wireless, mimic a tomato or
zucchini to monitor shipped items from inside packaging crates.
If broken eggs and bruised potatoes could talk, they might just reveal secrets that could save an organization big money. A new family of products from a Charlottetown, PEI-based company can't give voice to vegetables, but does the next best thing.
Wayd McNally, President and CEO of Sensor Wireless, saw how much produce was lost or damaged along a typical supply chain, and it gave him an idea.
What if you could throw a device in with shipped goods and somehow measure just what happens to them along the way? That was back in 1997. Today, after much research and development, that idea has evolved into active wireless sensor products such as the Smart Spud, CrackLess Egg and Smart Bottle.
The system employs highly sensitive devices that look and act like a potato, an egg or whatever else a company ships, McNally said. "When the CrackLess Egg sensor moves through (the supply chain), it looks like an egg and it acts like an egg. It weighs the same and it has identical roll characteristics."
Users can buy pre-made devices off the shelf or devices can be custom designed to "mimic" a host of real-life products: a particular fruit, bottle or package, for example. Active sensors are built into the units, which are then placed "undercover" alongside the real products. They travel along the entire supply chain, and are used to measure conditions such as temperature, humidity, vibration, impact and pressure - all without interfering with existing processes or equipment.
The active wireless sensors are smaller and more customizable than anything else on the market, McNally said. Most simple Radio Frequency tags available today are very limited in what they can measure, or require cumbersome batteries, or can only send information in certain frequencies.
This new breed of more sophisticated sensors can feed back real-time information to the customer via Global Positioning Systems and other wireless technologies. Customers can monitor remote assets and pull up charts or graphs of where problems are occurring. The information can then be used to streamline processes, tweak temperatures, change packaging, etc., in an effort to improve the quality of goods being delivered.
McNally described one client who had more than 40,000 cases of eggs broken during transport and could not nail down the problem. Sensor Wireless discovered the eggs experienced numerous stress points along the supply chain, rather than one large event.
"Impact can occur at a certain point in the line, but the actual break may occur at a different point. It has a cumulative effect. With these sensors, you get to see exactly where the issues are occurring - you get to the root cause."
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