Cold chain monitoring
Regional food distributor (Colombia)
- Year
- 2024
- Duration
- 5 months
- Sector
- Food · Cold chain
Challenge
Losses from cold chain breaks not detected in time and no traceability for audits.
Solution
IoT sensor network in cold rooms with real-time telemetry, multi-channel alerts and a centralized dashboard per site.
The client operated multiple refrigerated storage sites without continuous visibility on chamber temperatures. Breaks were discovered days later when inventorying damaged goods, causing significant operational losses and complaints from retail customers. We designed a non-invasive architecture: wireless Modbus sensors in each chamber, an LTE gateway per site with local buffer, a central MQTT broker, InfluxDB with 18-month retention, and Grafana for visualization. Alerts were tiered by level (SMS to operator, email to supervisor, call to manager) with documented runbooks. The most sensitive stage was the food-safety audit — per-batch, per-minute temperature traceability was key to certification.
Stack
Modbus sensors · LTE · MQTT · InfluxDB · Grafana · SMS/email alerts
Key metrics
- ✓ −80% in monthly losses
- ✓ 0 unattended breaks after deploy
- ✓ Certified traceability for audit
- ✓ Estimated ROI in 7 months
Guide: How to start an industrial IoT project in Colombia
A short PDF with the checklist we use to evaluate feasibility, budget and connectivity before buying a single sensor. No marketing, just what a project lead needs to know.
- ✓How to size connectivity (NB-IoT, LoRaWAN, satellite)
- ✓Checklist for a 4 to 8-week pilot
- ✓Budget structure by phase
- ✓Typical mistakes and how to avoid them