A grocery store in Pennsylvania is reaping the benefits of an IoT system that keeps an eye on its refrigerated cases, as Steve Rogerson discovered.

Last month, Derrick Altman, store manager at Shop ’n’ Save Foods in Pennsylvania, was at home not long after the grocery store closed. He received a notification that a refrigerated case had gone down.

“I was able to pull up the line graphs on my phone, and I knew something was wrong,” he told me when we chatted last week.

He immediately set off for the store and discovered a failed contactor, which was easily replaced, and the case was up and running again in just fifteen minutes.

“Without the alert, nobody would have noticed it till the morning and everything inside it would have been lost,” he said. “That was $20,000 worth of stock.”

And just a year ago, the stock loss would have happened as Derrick had no system in place to stop such an event, not that he hadn’t tried. Derrick has been at the shop for around sixteen years and has witnessed a number of stock losses that have cost thousands of dollars.

“I have seen a lot of equipment failures and they have always led to significant loss of product, especially in high dollar segments such as meat,” he said. “I have been searching for a solution that was cost effective. We are a retail store and the bottom line is important. The equipment I was getting quoted for was expensive, plus there was a service charge.”

He found it hard to justify the costs he was being asked to pay as they could often be more than he was losing through refrigerators failing, but he also knew that the amount he was losing was not sustainable. The answer to his dilemma came from Texas firm Lonestar Tracking. Its temperature sensors tap into a low-frequency Helium wireless network and were designed for grocery stores.

“I was sceptical because we had tried other similar systems, but none of those were tailored to the retail market,” said Derrick. “Because cases are opened regularly, it is not unusual for them to go above the temperature for short periods. Anything that went off every time would cause too many false alarms.”

Lonestar’s system can be adjusted to send an alert only if the temperature is too high for a settable amount of time. The sensors, which Derrick installed himself – a process he said was very easy – cost about $50 each, and he needed 30 of them. The basestation was another $200. He is also paying $10 a year per sensor. One saved stock load from a refrigerator going down more than pays for that.

“We are a family-run store without infinite pockets,” said Derrick.

I also talked with Thomas Remmert, CTO at Lonestar Tracking (www.lonestartracking.com), who said one of the main reasons to use a LoRaWan on the Helium (www.helium.com) network was cost.

“At $10 a year, this is something that every grocery store or restaurant can have,” he said.

So far, Lonestar has installed around 900 systems, mostly in the catering departments of schools, but restaurants and grocery stores are the firm’s second largest market. It has also installed a small number of systems in medical research facilities, but they use a more expensive sensor that can go down to -196˚C.

When Lonestar first worked with Derrick, it initially installed a private LoRaWan, but that kept going off line due to interference that was difficult to pinpoint.

“So we switched him over to the Helium network,” said Thomas.

That solved the problem and provided useful redundancy, and, as mentioned, the sensors were easy for Derick to install himself.

“I couldn’t imagine it being any easier,” he said. “The sensors all have screw holes; we decided where to put them, and that was that. I didn’t have to do codes or QR scans. It was harder to install my camera doorbell at home.”

Easy to install and not that expensive, so I can see why Derrick is happy, and I suspect his customers are having cool shopping days as a result.