Santa Clara, CA, US: Intelleflex has been named a “Top Green Provider” by Food Logistics Magazine.
The editors of Food Logistics recognise and award companies whose products, services, or exemplary leadership enhance sustainability within the food and beverage industry.
The judges focused on solution providers that embrace environmental best practices as central to their operations, and in doing so, play a key role in their customers’ efforts to reduce waste and negative impact on the environment while helping to advance awareness throughout the cold supply chain.
Intelleflex provides on-demand data visibility for partner solutions that enhance sustainability and reduce waste throughout the cold supply chain. With the cost of annual food waste of approximately $35bn globally — one-third of gross production value — Intelleflex-based solutions help reduce food waste by enabling cold chain suppliers to improve the delivered freshness of perishable foods to retailers by ensuring that those foods have sufficient remaining shelf life — reducing or eliminating the losses of entire pallet loads of perishables and maximizing delivered yield.
Last year, Intelleflex and ProWare Services, conducted a case study with an international berry grower that showed how adopting Intelleflex’s on-demand RFID temperature monitoring products provided suppliers with actionable data to reduce food waste and help minimise environmental impact associated with that waste.
The wireless access to the pallet-level temperature data, based on EPC and ISO standards, enables improved workflow and reduced labour in managing product quality. Through pallet-level temperature monitoring, Intelleflex systems improved delivered quality from the field to the pack house, in the pre-cool phase, and from pack house to retail distribution through the use of prioritised routing.
The actionable data captured by Intelleflex temperature-monitoring devices enabled the berry grower to build pallets of uniform berry quality, prioritise shipments, and to quickly reroute perishables based on their relative remaining shelf life.
By wasting less and optimising logistics operations, Intelleflex products can prevent a series of negative impacts on the environment. According to the United Nations Environment Program, “wasting food is not only an inefficient use of ecosystem services [like water] and of the fossil fuel-based resources that go into producing them, but also a significant contributor to global warming.
In the USA, organic waste is the second highest component of landfills, which are the largest source of methane emissions.” By helping to maximise delivered yield, Intelleflex enables producers and suppliers to feed more people with the same quantity of food originally produced, while also reducing the use of water, pesticide, fertiliser and fuel that would otherwise be required to increase production. Additionally, growers waste fewer natural resources by reducing supply chain inefficiencies.
“Sustainability in the supply chain continues to evolve as more companies recognise the necessity for environmental conservation, while new technologies are making it easier to adopt and quantify sustainable practices,” said Lara L Sowinski, editor-in-chief at Food Logistics.
“The companies on this year’s list have proven that making a commitment to sustainability in their operations not only delivers a measurable return on investment, but gives them a competitive advantage in the marketplace and in the eyes of their customers.”
“It’s a great honour to be recognised by Food Logistics as a Top Green Provider and receive acknowledgment that on-demand, actionable data can help reduce waste and improve resource utilisation throughout the cold chain,” said Peter Mehring, president and chief executive, Intelleflex.
“Working with our partners, we are enabling cold chain suppliers to capture and share actionable data about the condition of fresh food — from the field to the retailer — helping them maximize delivered yield and quality while minimising the impact on the environment.”
