A lot of money is riding on getting this healthy food shipper’s cold chain right. An added layer of temperature monitoring helps everyone involved keep cool.

New York-based Daily Harvest launched in 2017 as a local smoothie delivery service and has grown and developed over time into a subscription service shipping preassembled meal kits and premade frozen vegan bowls, flatbread snacks, soups, smoothies and snacks directly to customers nationwide. The company also distributes to major store chains including Ralph’s, Kroger, Wegmans, Costco and Target. 

Customers first pick a plan — nine, 14 or 24 items for scheduled delivery — and then select from a menu of chef-designed kit recipes and ready-to-eat dishes that are stored frozen or thawed. These then typically take 3-4 minutes to prepare in a skillet, toaster, microwave or, in the case of smoothies, by adding milk in a blender. 

Freshness, health, convenience and reliability are core to Daily Harvest’s brand identity and competitive advantage. Customer expectations are high. A lot can go wrong, whether inbound — in the sourcing of fresh, certified organic ingredients — or outbound, as the temperature-controlled kits and prepared meals are delivered to customer front doors and store shelves. Nothing can be left to chance.

A Need for End-to-end, Real-time Visibility

Maintaining a precise, consistent temperature range for both inbound ingredients and outbound product — mainly in the 0o to -10o range — is critical to operations, not just to ensure food safety but to extend shelf life, says Daily Harvest vice president for supply chain, Wesley Williams. “As the company was expanding and we were moving product around our network, we were using a lot of third parties,” he explains. “We don't own our facilities or the trucks, so we build process, putting guardrails in place that give us confidence that our partners are doing what we expect of them.”

Inbound sourcing is relatively simpler, because Daily Harvest controls the supplier relationships, processes and technology —and is the ultimate end user. 

“While we don’t own those facilities, they’re ours in the sense that we have a partnership with a distribution center, and I'm basically doing an inter-company transfer to another fulfillment center that I also have a direct partnership with,” Williams says. “Where it really starts to break down is in my outbound distribution to retail, delivering into distribution centers owned by our customers or their distributors. I have no relationship with them, I can't build process with them, and they’re inbounding product from hundreds of thousands of different brands and customers.”

The key differentiator then becomes an ability to collect reliable tracking and shipment status data at the SKU level dynamically — anytime, anywhere in the move, in transit or at rest. 

Good vs. Good Enough

The solution, in this case, is location and temperature sensor technology from Boston-based Tive — the global leader in supply chain and logistics visibility technology.

“Logistics is hard, but when you talk about temp control there’s a whole other layer to it,” says Raj Nagarajah, Tive director of sales – food vertical. “In managing something that goes into a human-consumed product, you need to make sure that product is arriving as fresh as possible, with no issues downstream. And when you talk about a supply chain like Daily Harvest’s with multiple layers — inbound, including fresh procurement and raw procurement of goods, and then distributing it to a retail center — that's our wheelhouse.”

Shipment tracking and logging sensors have been available in various forms for decades, but the tradeoff between performance and cost has limited use to the highest-value, most time-sensitive freight — often with specialized handling requirements. Vendor selection has typically entailed uneasy compromises that vary by customer and product.  

Many advanced sensor solutions are still “passive” — collecting data in transit that is only read after the fact, once sensors are returned. The real-time relay component remains cost-prohibitive for many shippers.

Tive stands out by offering both “active” and “passive” shipment tracking solutions to capture and report shipment data to the Tive cloud. A majority of Tive customers use the Solo 5G or Solo Lite trackers to monitor real-time shipment location, temperature, and light exposure, and the Solo 5G also provides humidity and shock monitoring. Certain companies, such as Daily Harvest, also include passive Tive Tags on some shipments to log time and temperature data only. Tags are read upon delivery, providing a low-cost option for, say, inbound freight.  

The Solo 5G and Solo Lite trackers validate overall product integrity based on predefined objectives for a wide range of product types, including high-value goods, perishables and pharmaceuticals. Also, Tive offers a 24/7 Live Monitoring service which provides cost savings versus in-house staffing and training costs. 

Weighing the Benefits

Tive’s engagement with Daily Harvest began with inbound logistics, but was instrumental over time in driving new growth in their retail distribution. “When we started [with Daily Harvest] there wasn't as much retail,” Nagarajah says. “It was really more on the inbound side. As they expanded in new business areas using the technology, it helped them to extend those same safety measures.”

Tive worked with Daily Harvest and its mainly inbound transportation and warehouse partners to get inbound temperature monitoring up and running. Tive shared valuable technology and training with the supplier in exchange for the supplier’s cooperation with monitoring. At that point Daily Harvest was able to deploy the trackers and loggers to independently monitor downstream retail distribution. 

“Tive actually had some unique products and service lines that no one else that we had met with actually was able to offer, at a lower cost point for us,” Williams adds. “Ultimately at the end of the day, it was the price point, the additional services that they were able to offer with their technology, and the ease of implementation and accessing and visualizing the information, which were most meaningful to us.” 

A Daily Harvest associate now tracks the time-coded downstream data from partner warehouses, to ensure that shipment temperatures have remained in range. If not, the truck must be stopped, the customer alerted, and arrangements made to deliver a substitute shipment.

Luckily, Williams says, with Tive that scenario is rare. “Ultimately what we’ve determined from using the Tags and the temperature loggers is that we really don't need to focus as much time and effort, or have as much concern, because our partners are doing what we expect them to do.” Must be a nice feeling.

Video link: https://vimeo.com/user176096710/review/1063034455/599763a867