Fresh product traceability is a trend in modern society and involves different stakeholders from a local fruit producer to final consumers in a distant supermarket, with extensive use of means of transportation.
All stakeholders are interested in keeping an unbroken cold chain, that is, an uninterrupted series of storage and distribution activities which maintain a given temperature range that depends on the transported goods.
Breaking this cold chain involves pains and problems for all of them:
- Producers are not selling their product in the best conditions, damaging their public image and operating account.
- Transport companies fail in their main acitivity.
- Insurance companies are sometimes paying for the losses.
- Export companies suffer discounts at arrival to destination.
- Supermarkets lose sales due to a worse goods quality and appearance.
- Citizens are consuming goods with poorer quality and properties.
As a technological company, GEEZAR has used IoT tools fo developing FruitWatcher, fulfilling the information vacuum in transport processes and advancing to a real time reliable solution that assesses traceability and good conditions along transport for achieving the best consumption quality.
The main objective of this project was putting in the market a service for monitoring the goods along transportation processes, after an initial development and having Minimum Viable Products already in testing stage. GEEZAR needed to know about the actual market response in actual sales conditions, to implement further development and features and to establish a reliable operating framework in terms of IP, production, pricing, post-sales, public image, etc.
All these objectives have been worked out along Phase 1 works, reaching the following conclusions:
- The service is being accepted by the market, confirming free initial trials as a right strategy for achieving actual sales.
- We can provide side services for non refrigerated vehicles positioning at competitive prices. This increases our range of potential customers.
- The chance of collaborating with vehicles manufacturers for FruitWatcher device preinstallation as manufacturing option exists and one manufacturer is already working with us.
- The chance of placing the device in multi-platform containers has been discarded for operational and market reasons.
- The problem of device returning to our customers in case of intercontinental shipments has reached a satisfactory solution. This problem prevented some potential customers to actually hire the service.
Therefore, the project has the commercial potential we needed to confirm and GEEZAR bets on it as its main business line.
