PicoLite Solution: Monitoring Sausage Shipment in the Cold Chain

Ready-to-eat processed poultry products (sausages and cold-cuts) must be maintained at temperatures between 0 °C and 4 °C during shipment to ensure they stay fresh and are safe for human consumption. Thus companies exporting processed meat products need to monitor their products throughout the cold chain to verify that the quality and safety of their products are not compromised as well as ensuring compliancy with required cold chain regulations.

About the Customer:

A leading producer of high quality ready-to-eat processed poultry products under international quality standards. The company employs more than 100 people and produces around 4000 tons of delicatessen meats and sausages annually, while a quarter of this produce is exported to Europe and North America.

Key Customer Challenges:

Transportation of the processed poultry products by the manufacturer to their customers in Europe and North America requires a temperature between 0 °C and 4 °C to ensure product quality and safety. In order to verify the products were stored at the needed temperature during shipment, the company required a temperature monitoring solution that will enable them to monitor the shipment process and produce PDF data reports with alarm indications. The company used other solutions for temperature monitoring in the past that were more expensive and were often lost during their return to the production plant. The company therefore searched for a more cost effective solution.

PicoLite Solution:

The company added Fourtec's PicoLite single-trip USB data logger to the cold chain transportation of their processed meat products from the production plant to various destinations in Europe and North America. The PicoLite device is placed inside a cooled container in which the meat products are transported. The PicoLite monitors the temperature during shipment, enabling the company to view the shipment data by connecting the device via USB to the computer upon its arrival to the destination, making sure that the required temperature was maintained. A PDF report with alarm indications, specifying if there are any deviations from pre-defined thresholds, is automatically generated as soon as the product shipment has reached its destination. Using the license-free DataSuite software or the weboomerang® application (Fourtec’s cloud-based application for emailing trip reports over the web), this feature enables the company to have immediate access to the data collected over the course of the journey and receive a detailed trip report via email, in PDF format, as soon as the logger is connected to the PC during transit or at the final destination.

Measurable Results:

The PicoLite proved to be a cost effective solution, providing accurate and reliable conformation of temperature with detailed analysis of shipments from origin to destination. Using a single-trip logger saves the company the overhead associated with returning multi-trip data loggers back to the shipper, as well as eliminating the risk that the logger itself is lost. Using the weboomerang application overcomes the challenge of quickly receiving the trip’s data reports from its customers. When the logger is connected to the computer, the weboomerang application handles the rest, up until the point where the report reaches the intended recipients’ inbox.