Smart Freezer Sensors Help Domino’s and 7-Eleven Cut Food Waste

Refrigerators, freezers, and refrigerated warehouses are vulnerable to malfunctions or human error that can lead to spoilage and food waste.

These weak links in the cold chain amount to $161 million of food waste in the U.S.

Startup Therma, however, believes to have an answer to these supply chain problems.

GreenBiz reports that the company has developed a smart temperature and humidity sensor you can mount inside the freezer to record real-time data and send alerts if temperatures rise above a set threshold.

While this sounds like nothing new, Therma’s achievement is the long-range radio technology used to send these signals through metal enclosures and dense insulation of freezers and cold rooms.

"Refrigeration units or a walk-in-freezer or a warehouse often have iron or steel, and have historically blocked signals," said Manik Suri, founder and CEO of Therma. "These densely insulated environments have been very hard for previous generations of internet of things protocols to penetrate."

Therma was launched in 2019 and in 2020 the company managed to deliver 831 sensors to 29 unique customers including McDonald’s, Starbucks, Burger King, 7-Eleven, Wyndham Hotels, and Domino’s.