Case study · Food transport
From finding out afterwards to seeing it on the road
A national food distributor only heard about temperature problems in its fleet once the stock was lost. With live readings from every vehicle on Sematics, it now sees risks while there is still time to act, and its audit records are ready when asked.
- Customer
- A national food distributor
- Sector
- Food transport
- Rules it served
- Food hygiene temperature control and customer audits
- Monitored
- Refrigerated vehicles across a national fleet
- Trained
- Drivers through to quality managers
The problem
In chilled and frozen food transport, a small drift in a trailer's temperature can mean lost stock, a rejected delivery and an awkward conversation with the customer.
The distributor's existing monitoring only raised an alert once a problem had already happened. By then the product was lost. Compliance reports took hours to prepare, and with no clear record of why incidents happened, the same problems kept coming back.
What we did
The distributor moved its fleet onto live monitoring on the Sematics platform.
- Wireless sensors fitted to every vehicle, sending live temperature readings.
- Alarm thresholds set for each product, and related alarms grouped, so teams see the alerts that matter.
- The platform connected to the existing fleet systems, giving managers one place to see live conditions, trends and compliance status.
- Training for everyone from drivers to quality managers on reading the data and acting on it.
- Regular performance reviews, so risks are dealt with before they become incidents.
The result
There are fewer temperature excursions across the fleet, and less waste. Drivers and managers are no longer distracted by alerts that don't matter, and when something does go wrong it is fixed faster, with a record of what happened, why, and what was done.
Audit preparation is quicker because the records are logged and stored as the vehicles run, and customers can be shown the data behind each delivery.
In figures
What changed, at a glance
Alarm on the road, driver told, load checked before delivery.
Related
If this sounds like your site
Food and cold storage
Monitoring for warehouses, cold stores and the vehicles between them.
Read moreTemperature excursions
What to do when a reading leaves its range, and how to record it.
Read moreIntegrations
How Sematics connects to the systems you already use.
Read more
Source: Case study published on jtfwireless.com; customer not named. The figure shown is for the Sematics platform as a whole, not this customer. The figure: Sematics platform records, October 2026.
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