My name is Tom Clasen. I work for Knolan’s Super Markets in the Minneapolis-Saint Paul market. My role is Vice President of Operations, and that encompasses a broad array of things in our company.
Well, as you may know, the grocery industry is very refrigeration intensive and with every passing year, food safety becomes a much more important topic. And so, we decided seven-eight years ago that we needed to do better with monitoring and reacting to our cold chain procedures. And so we looked around, got some advice from others, and found SmartSense and never looked back.
First of all, great access to data for any sort of troubleshooting, looking at things, real time reaction to problems out in the field. SmartSense helped us uncover things that weren't catastrophic problems but that were, let's say, refrigeration that wasn't running optimally both from an energy usage standpoint and from a product quality standpoint. So, it wasn't failing to the point where you had product loss or things like that, but you were running slightly sub-optimally for holding and things like that. And we uncovered a large amount of issues with our refrigeration that we were then able to rectify.
Refrigerants are very expensive to replace now and getting harder and harder to source, so we would find problems with that sooner and avoid a large loss of refrigerant, which is both bad for the environment and a hit to our company's bottom line.
Where you have a direct relationship to customers' satisfaction when you may sell them a fresh meat product that looks perfectly fine in the case, but if it has been held at slightly sub-optimal temperatures — the customer eats that two days later and has a less than 100% satisfaction with that product.
We've actually had to hire a compliance person to bring on board, so we take this very seriously. We are definitely being proactive about this, and we think that SmartSense plays a huge role in being ready for FSMA.
