SUPERMARKET REFRIGERATION
Refrigeration regeneration
Eric Winandy, director of integrated solutions at Emerson, discusses what the future holds for supermarket cold aisles.
A
s experts gather to discuss the Future of Retail with the Financial Times later this month, it’s evident that our retail landscape continues to undergo a period of huge change. And as discounters like Aldi and Lidl become increasingly popular, and online shopping eats away at the number of customers visiting the physical stores of the UK’s big four, nowhere is this more keenly felt than in the grocery sector. To top it off , retailers of all sub-sectors and sizes are under increasing scrutiny and pressure to improve their sustainability credentials.
This ever-changing landscape is having a more signifi cant
eff ect on retail refrigeration systems than we might think. Here, we look at our top 4 predictions for what will be big in the future of our supermarket cold chains over the next 18 months or so.
It’s easy to think about supermarket refrigeration exclusively as the cold cabinets and aisles we encounter in-store. In reality, however, before our food reaches its fi nal point-of-sale destination it passes through a number of diff erent handlers across the supply chain – from manufacturer to processor to warehouse storage and distribution, not to mention all the transport and logistics stages in between. And it’s that cold chain from farm-to- fork that is currently undergoing a data revolution. Today, retailers have access to more data than ever, allowing for new opportunities to innovate and implement increasingly comprehensive management across the cold chain. Rather than narrowing the focus on one section, retailers can now think across entire enterprises and supply chains for broader insights and deeper intelligence into how their stores are operating, and learn where they can improve..
32 October 2018 Integration
Keeping and monitoring chilled foods at required temperatures at each stage of the supply chain – which is critical for food safety and quality management – has always been a challenge. However, merging the latest refrigeration and monitoring technologies with greater data storage capacity via cloud services, for example, means more advanced analytical tools can be leveraged to create greater interoperability between diff erent systems, using application programming interfaces (APIs). As such, retailers are increasingly able to connect and share information such as food temperature monitoring and tracking data across the cold chain, ensuring a more constant temperature transition and compliance between suppliers.
This shared data capability comes into its own when a deep understanding of the cold chain is required to pinpoint more easily when and where something might have gone wrong. Take the outbreak of
E.coli linked to romaine lettuce purchased at grocery outlets across the US and Canada earlier this year, for example. After customers became ill and the story hit the headlines, many demanded to know where the contamination had occurred. In this case, integrated technology systems and data analysis were essential in tracking the instance of contamination back to a specifi c farm.
Sustainability
Another trend shaping the retail landscape is the continuous drive for sustainability. From the reduction of plastic packaging and food wastage, to the focus on a low-carbon economy, retailers are constantly under pressure to become greener.
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