Supporting partners addressing food insecurity in Los Angeles and beyond

Food Forward is a nonprofit organization that brings fresh surplus fruits and vegetables to people experiencing food insecurity across 12 California counties and six adjacent states, including tribal lands. They have recovered and distributed 250 million pounds of fresh fruits and vegetables - that's 1 billion servings and they're just getting started! (FoodForward.org)

ConnectedFresh delivers value-driven operations use cases to hospitality customers. Sensor solutions enable teams to be more accurate in their reporting and data collection, more efficient with their time and labor, and realize significant savings by being operationally proactive, fixing issues before they become problems. Use cases include temperature and humidity monitoring, energy efficiency monitoring, remaining useful life estimation, leak detection, and much more.

Challenge

The Food Forward team recovers massive amounts of fruit and produce every week, bringing product to their central warehouse and placing it in massive walk-in coolers. Temperature logging was a manual process and they were not a 24/7 operation, so if a refrigerator failed overnight or over the weekend, it would be many hours or days until they found the result. Any issues were directly reducing the impact that the organization could have delivering these products to those who needed it most.

Solution

ConnectedFresh delivered a preconfigured sensor solution, free of charge, allowing the Food Forward team to get started immediately. The team simply had to turn the equipment on and it was already connected. The temperature sensors delivered are rated to work for 5-10 years on one charge inside of their coolers and other environments.

When something goes out of range, the Food Forward team is immediately notified to fix the issue before it becomes a major problem.

Results

The Food Forward team immediately saw results. Not only was ConnectedFresh providing notifications if something was out of range, but through this data they were able to uncover a much deeper understanding of how their equipment was operating and ways their team could optimize their processes. On average, Food Forward is realizing savings of $13,000 per year in labor productivity time and much higher savings due to risk mitigation to product loss and operational halts due to equipment failure.

Through the use of the connected fresh app we have been able to show our warehouse team how much room there was for improvement in keeping the walk-in  cooler doors closed on a more consistent basis in order to preserve the produce that comes through our warehouse on a daily basis.  Thanks to that data we've seen energy usage decrease significantly especially during the winter months.

Additionally we have had some power outages which we were able to respond to in a timely manner due to having this system online that otherwise would not have been know until the team returned from the weekend/holidays.

Amir Z, Managing Director of Programs

Services

AWS Services used include AWS IoT Core for LoRaWAN, AWS Lambda, AWS Amplify, Amazon RDS, Amazon SQS, Amazon SNS, Amazon CloudWatch, Amazon Route 53, Amazon ECS, and more. For additional information including architecture, click here.