A French SME offers an innovative solution for monitoring cold chain temperatures in real-time.

The French SME is a subsidiary of a Singaporean company, providing Radio frequency identification - RFID solutions to the main manufacturers of Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) aircraft engines and the Singaporean army. The mother company developed a proprietary long lasting RFID tag and set-up a software development team in Myanmar to offer cost-effective solutions to its customers. The proposed disruptive technology was developed by a Norwegian start-up, through 7 years of R&D and the French SME recently acquired the distribution licence for France and Spain. It provides an easy-to-use and affordable solution to companies involved in moving, storing and transforming perishable and temperature-sensitive products. Temperature control is compulsory all along the process to protect the product integrity and in some time, the client health. Monitoring systems are either manual, prone to mistakes with very high likelihood of undiscovered thermal deviations or automated but more costly and complex than the proposed solution. The proposed solution is made of a simple adhesive sticker, with an embedded patented NFC chip incorporating a thermometer. This sticker can be sticked to boxes, fridges frames, van cargo wall…It doesn’t require a battery and simply registers the temperature at a predefined frequency in its internal memory. Data are retrieved by tagging an NFC-enabled device ( a smartphone or a touchscreen tablet) to the sticker and sent to cloud-based platform. NFC by design has a limited field of operation, which prevents data snooping that could occur from a distance. Furthermore, the limited field plus other features of the protocol help to ensure that data exchange only occurs with the intended party. To use this technology, the user must define its quality plan with the French company to define the temperature sampling frequency, the number of tags and their location. A cloud-based account is then created to archive all temperature measurements, for every tag. Tags are then activated and put in place. Once the NFC-activated handphone is tapped on the tag, the measurement data appear on the phone through the application. Data are automatically sent to the cloud-based account and a report is sent by email to the administrator user. The service is proposed through a 12-months subscription. The French company is now seeking to enter into commercial agreements with technical assistance with Spanish companies dealing with the constraints of the cold chain management in the food and beverage industry such as restaurants, food businesses, food distributors and food transporters. Companies with the same constraints from the pharmaceutical sector are also sought.