IoT applications for data tagging the long-life sandwich cold chain:

IoT applications for data tagging the long-life sandwich cold chain: 

Led by: University of Birmingham

With partners: ScoreSafe Ltd, Participating Food Businesses

Project lead: Madeleine Smith, Senior Teaching Fellow, Chemical Engineering

Overview

Project aims:

1. To monitor the integrity of long-life sandwiches in the cold chain and validate their temperature maintenance in transportation and distribution areas using an automated monitoring system with cloud based data storage (the Scoresafe system).
2. To assess the hygiene practices during circulating the long-life sandwiches within cold chain.

The project will monitor the temperature of long-life sandwiches and assess hygiene practices during the circulation of the sandwiches in the local cold chain. Low temperature control of chilled foods is crucial to achieve safe and high quality goods. Temperature abuse leads to proliferation of spoilage and pathogenic microbes which can put temperature sensitive foods at risk of causing food borne diseases or producing undesirable characteristics. Additionally, the poor hygiene practices in making up and distributing chilled foods may increase their microbial loads adversely affecting shelf life.

The tiny tag data loggers have been proven to be effective and accurate in logging food temperatures (rather than air temperatures) and can be programmed to record at regular intervals over a long period of time.

The Scoresafe hygiene software is bespoke software for use on any android device which has been designed by the UoB and ScoreSafe to monitor CCP’s and automatically store the results on the cloud. This allows real time access to the data by anyone with the authority to access it.

The sandwiches will be attached with tiny tag temperature data recorders (TG4080) to monitor their temperature remotely. These recorders are programmed to report all temperature readings during chilled transport and distribution where the sandwiches are most often exposed to temperature abuse. The cold chain scope starts at the manufacture and ends at sale to the final consumer.

Anticipated impact:

• It improves monitoring and control of chilled foods temperature at transit and distribution as most tracking systems of refrigerated foods monitor only a set point
• Provide food companies and local authorities with ongoing quantitative data on validation of expiry date during the shelf life of chilled products. This contributes to reducing food loss resulting from spoiled and unsafe products and protects public health by ensuring correct storage during the time the food is placed on the market.
• Accumulated data can be stored and modeled in database, and used by Food Standard Agency and food industry as a reference to improve more efficient refrigeration systems.