Utilising Cold Chain Management to ensure the quality of produce for customers

Who are Sundrop Farms? 

Sundrop Farms' state-of-the-art facility at Port Augusta in South Australia is a pioneering hydroponic farming concept. The large-scale sustainable operation is world-leading in food production, and unlike many ‘traditional’ farming set-ups that rely on soil or fertilisers, their key ingredients are sun and seawater. 

The facility opened its doors in 2015 and has transformed agriculture by producing food without harming the environment. Their mission is to  ‘benefit the environment and the local community in which they operate.  Showing the world that you can grow delicious, mouthwatering produce without needing fossil fuels, vast amounts of fresh water and thousands of acres of cultivated farmland.’ 

Challenges 

Sundrop produces high-quality truss tomatoes that are distributed across Australia through a major Australian retailer and are committed to delivering fruit that provides a great taste to its customers. Continual arrival issues indicated potential temperature abuse throughout transportation, this led to the requirement of a cold chain management solution that would provide accurate and real-time visibility of product temperature from the farm to DC, enabling changes to be made that would improve quality control and brand trust. 

Implementing Cold Chain Management

Ensuring produce is consistently of the highest quality once it reaches supermarket shelves is key to any fresh food supplier. With large volumes of tomatoes leaving Sundrop every day, throughout the year to retail distribution centres across Australia, identifying points where product temperature abuse may occur was crucial for quality management. 

Muddy Boots Cold Chain Management solution provides continuous temperature data during transport to DC. Once the product reaches DC data is auto uploaded to Greenlight Quality Management, providing an accurate record of any abuse of temperature. Michael Rogers, Health, Safety and Compliance Manager at Sundrop Farms, explains that this has ‘provided a record of temperature measurement that we can give to transport companies showing breaches in temperature, this assists us in better cold chain management to maximise customer experience.’ 

Muddy Boots Cold Chain Management offers a combined software and hardware approach that transforms the product into an intelligent, self-diagnosing data source. Utilising real-time cloud-based software to measure, identify and drive continuous improvement of both cold chain infrastructure and quality control practices.  

Future plans

Sundrop plans to use cold chain management ‘as an ongoing commitment to food safety and quality. A commitment that is shared between us and our customers’ explains Michael Rogers.  

‘The use of a live system that flags both high and low-temperature extremes, providing a location of the breach, time and duration will allow us to have corrective actions allocated specifically to the event that occurred.’ 

These analytics drive continuous improvement and allow for easy trend analysis and performance benchmarking. Reducing rejection rates,  product waste and helping businesses to meet their sustainability goals.