When fresh produce spoils before hitting grocery shelves, the blame rarely lies with a broken refrigerator. Instead, the damage occurs in the unmonitored gaps of transit, says Giampaolo Marino, chief strategy and growth officer for Energous.
Marino says the root of the problem is that despite the widespread use of RFID technology, today’s supply chain still relies heavily on manual intervention just to determine the status of a pallet.
Because standard RFID operates as a “periodic sort of asset tracking,” it leaves critical data gaps, Marino says, warning that combining tracking technology with a process that is heavily manual creates dangerous blind spots.
“You sort of get into some blind spot where ... you have [a] temperature excursion ... that might last for more than five minutes,” he says.
These issues typically thrive during hands-off checkpoints, such as when a pallet moves from a temperature-controlled staging area into a loading dock where the dock door is open, he says.
The Cost of a Five-Minute Excursion
For perishable items, minutes matter.
“Imagine you have a pallet of meat ... sitting at a temperature of 85°F,” Marino says. “It takes five minutes to spoil that package at that temperature — that entire pallet.”
Under traditional systems, a grocer won’t know a shipment was compromised until a worker manually scans it at the next destination, by which time the quality has already degraded. To solve this, Energous is deploying automated wireless power networks that eliminate manual scanning entirely. In this setup, “the tag gets energy from the wireless power network and then sends back the data, and then the data is basically being pushed into the cloud,” he says.
With data traveling “automatically from what we call the physical layer ... all the way to the cloud” with “no latency and no manuality whatsoever,” retailers receive updates every few seconds, Marino says. If a temperature spike occurs, it’s known right away. This immediate visibility allows grocers to act fast.
“That level of automation ... enables the customer to really catch these issues before they become detrimental,” Marino says, noting that teams can now intervene within two to three minutes. In real-world applications, this rapid response has successfully cut product loss and spoilage by 30% to 40%.
Meeting the New Mandates for Freshness
Transitioning to continuous tracking is no longer just a financial advantage for grocers; rather, it is fast becoming a regulatory necessity. The push for smarter supply chains is accelerating due to new compliance pressures. Marino says fresh food is facing heightened scrutiny as new government regulations — specifically Section 204 of the Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA 204), also known as the Food Traceability Rule — mandate rigorous traceability throughout the U.S. supply chain.
Under these strict tracking laws, food safety depends on end-to-end transparency.
“When dealing with fresh products, retailers must be able to trace that item all the way from its point of origin right to the front of the store,” Marino says. Crucially, retailers must prove “that product never went through any sort of temperature excursion that might have ... degraded the quality of the product itself,” he adds. Faced with these demands, the grocery sector can no longer rely on sporadic checks.
By replacing manual gaps with automated, real-time wireless tracking, grocers gain the precise data tools necessary “to provide that level of traceability, not just to a government agency but all the way to consumers,” he says.
