Therma’s sensors help restaurants owners monitor and improve their freezers and fridges to combat food waste. //Courtesy of Therma As director of operations for 11 Domino’s Pizzas in Colorado, Bill Oliver has a unique anxiety that rattles around his brain — that one morning his staff will open the store and head back to the freezer section to start the day’s orders only to find the dough, vegetables and meats sitting there unfrozen. Refrigerators, freezers and warehouses are vulnerable to malfunctions or human error issues that could result in spoilage and, ultimately, food waste. This link in the cold chain is part of the $161 million food waste problem in the United States. The Boston Consulting Group calculated that “deploying more-advanced supply chain solutions — including cold chain [technologies] in developing markets — could reduce the problem by $150 billion annually.” Startup Therma , which recently raised $10.2 million, hopes to be part of those more advanced supply chain solutions. The company has created a smart temperature and humidity sensor that’s mounted inside freezers to record real-time data and send alerts if temperatures rise above a certain threshold. Therma’s breakthrough is using long-range radio to send the signals through […]
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