What Are The Ways to Reduce Food Waste?

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What Are The Ways to Reduce Food Waste?

• Can IoT help retailers curb food wastage at the
  store level?

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What is IoT?

• IoT is an extensive network of interrelated
  computing devices, digital and mechanical
  machines, objects, animals, or even people that
  are equipped with unique identifiers (UIDs).
  Everything that is connected to this network is
  capable of sharing data that contains information
  like the current location of the device as well
  as its location.

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• For instance, all devices that you use every day
  (smartphones, tablets, desktop computers,
  laptops, automobiles, electrical appliances,
  etc.) utilize several forms of technology that
  enable them to constantly transfer their data in
  one single IoT platform. Once the IoT platform
  receives the data, it automatically integrates
  all the information collected from various
  sources. This is where analytics comes in, where
  essential information is extracted from the
  stored data to be analyzed and used for multiple
  purposes.

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IoT Can It Be Used to Reduce Food Waste?

• A growing problem that continues to succumb to
  many food retailers today is no other than food
  waste. The food industry in particular has
  already lost billions of dollars annually due to
  the waste of certain perishable items. Such a
  problem may even make things worse by producing
  tons worth of greenhouse gases which is not
  suitable for the environment. The good thing is,
  IoT can be a useful tool to minimize if not
  wholly, prevent food waste. Heres how

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• Increased monitoring in food processing plants

Using cameras in food processing plants such as
those that produce meat can install digital
cameras throughout the area to assess the
performance of food operators. The data from the
footage received can be used for giving feedback
so that the operator can accomplish a better job
the next time around. This helps to avoid
discrepancies in every task related to food
processing like food waste.
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• Keep track of fruit respiration rates and
  freshness

If a retail business is earning a considerable
amount of revenue from selling fruits, there is a
good chance that packages that arrive at the
store contain fruit products with varying
freshness and respiration rates. Stuffing fruit
products with different conditions in a single
packaging is not a good idea if limiting food
waste is the main priority. But by using IoT
sensors, fruit sellers can customize their
packaging tasks based on the fruit respiration
rates and freshness so that monitoring shelf life
and reducing waste can be done with ease.
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• Prevent food waste with ESLs

The use of Electronic Shelf Labels or ESLs by a
growing number of companies all over the world
makes them a major contributor to the popularity
of IoT-based technologies. Perhaps the best way
to impede the loss of profit from wasted food
products is by implementing pricing strategies
that can solve a bunch of other problems in daily
business operations. While traditional price tags
of the past are only designed for displaying
prices on products, ESL tags can do much more.
The product data showed by ESLs are digital and
can be changed and updated in real-time, as they
are all connected to a central server that
enables them to be inputted on an IoT platform.
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Contact us today if you are interested to learn
about SOLUM ESL Solutions and how we can help
your retail business take advantage of wireless
connectivity to improve your workforce
productivity as well as food waste management.