Festival Foods, one of Wisconsin's largest privately held grocers, has selected Digi’s SmartSense IoT-based condition monitoring for task management and continuous temperature monitoring across all its locations.
 
The implementations are being made to help improve food quality and safety, increase employee efficiency, and reduce inventory loss.
 
Founded as a single store by Paul and Jane Skogen in 1946, Festival Foods now operates 32 locations and has more than 7500 employees across Wisconsin. Still entirely family- and employee-owned, Festival Foods' customer service and value ethos continue to fuel the company.
 
SmartSense food safety products were selected after a 30-day pilot that included real-time, product-level monitoring in all refrigeration units, food temperature monitoring in deli sections and automated task management. In addition to helping guarantee food safety, the combination of continuous, accurate temperature readings and automated record keeping saves thousands of dollars and employee hours per year by reducing lost inventory and manual tasks. In year two of the deployment, Festival Foods expects to realise a 300% return on its annual investment.
 
"SmartSense is a proactive approach to equipment maintenance and food safety that gives us the operational oversight we need to improve our bottom line and serve our guests better than ever," said Hsing-Yi Hsieh, Festival Foods director of food protection and regulatory affairs. "Now, every store has real-time access to temperature and food safety data at the product level, and we're able to get ahead of any potential issues well before they become a reality."
 
With SmartSense, food-based businesses can quickly deploy remote monitoring to improve productivity, compliance and quality control. Designed to deliver real-time insights, it provides a subscription-based service that continuously and wirelessly monitors task management activities and the temperature of perishable, high-value goods in different industries such as food services, healthcare, transportation and logistics or retail.
 
"So often in the food safety conversation we only hear about foodborne illness and potential contaminations and, while preventing those scenarios is paramount, there are also tremendous business benefits behind food safety solutions," said Kevin Riley, president for IoT products at Digi. "Festival Foods recognised that in addition to helping guarantee compliance, they had an opportunity to reduce product loss and divert valuable man hours from tedious manual recordkeeping to tasks that more directly impact customer experience. They've already seen those results in their pilot and now that will spread across the Festival footprint."