Project description
New stick-on monitoring tag to minimise cold chain risks
From hundreds of years ago, when fishermen used natural ice to preserve their fish stock piles while at sea, the transportation of temperature sensitive products along a supply chain has rapidly evolved. This is still not an easy task – the greater the physical distance, the risk of product damage is higher. Businesses in the pharmaceutical, medical and food industries rely on the cold chain – with thermal and refrigerated packaging methods and logistics – to transport their most sensitive products. The EU-funded TagAndGo project is promoting a system to identify failures and minimise losses along the cold chain. It will bring to market the first low-cost semi-passive stick-on tag that can enable real-time monitoring by product manufacturers, logistics providers and customers.
Objective
Every year, the pharma and food industries lose € 43 billion-worth of medicinal and nutritional products due to failures in cold chain logistics. Cold chain logistics is a complex network, where real-time tracking and monitoring of products is the only way to quickly identify failures and minimise losses. Manufacturers, such as pharma companies, who’s products are lost, are thus leading the push towards optimisation of tracking and tracing practices in cold chain logistics. But how can this be done? Temperature-sensitive sensor technologies, such as stick-on tracker tags, have the potential to reduce waste generated in cold-chain logistics by 5-7%, as temperature problems in the cold chain can be quickly identified and rectified. Today, this instant identification is only possible with so called semi-passive tags, which allow for real-time tracking of temperature-sensitive products. They are however very expensive, costing up to €18/tag. This means that for low-value products, where profit margins cannot cover the cost of these expensive tags, no optimisation of the logistics cold-chain and thus wastage prevention can occur. At Myruns, we have developed the first semi-passive stick-on tag, Tag&Go, at a 96% lower price than existing semi-passive solutions. Tag&Go is made possible through an optimised and patented processing route. Tag&Go simply “drops-in” to customer processes and enables real-time monitoring by any relevant party, such as product manufacturers, logistics providers or customers. Therefore, any failures in the logistics cold-chain can be identified instantly and cheaply, and rectified. €3 billion can be saved by preventing product damage through optimised cold chain logistics practices, and Tag&Go is a key enabler of this saving. Tag&Go has thus already received significant interest from the cold-chain-dependent pharma industry. We therefore expect to capture 2.2% of the European SAM by 2026, creating 60 new jobs in the process.
Fields of science
Programme(s)
Funding Scheme
SME-1 - SME instrument phase 1Coordinator
20009 DONOSTIA - SAN SEBASTIAN
Spain
The organization defined itself as SME (small and medium-sized enterprise) at the time the Grant Agreement was signed.