The precious food that we consume are perishable products that needs to be carefully stored at certain temperature range to prevent the food products from going bad and preserving its quality.
If the food products are not stored at the right temperature range, it’s perishability could drastically increase. Food products that could be stored for months will only last a few days outside of the appropriate storage environment.
Refer to the image below for a guideline on food products storage temperature range.
Image from Singapore Food Agency
While most food products can be preserved at the temperature of -18°C for a longer shelf life inside a freezer, there are food products that should be stored in chillers instead e.g., vegetables, soda drinks, etc.
Having said that, it is important to employ a simple and reliable temperature monitoring system to monitor your food products.
The most important values to look at in a temperature monitoring system for food products, are the temperature and humidity level. The environment must be cold enough to preserve the quality and avoid moisture to prevent bacteria growth that can lead to spoilage.
The minimum requirement of a temperature monitoring system for food products should be:
- Able to measure temperature range from -40 to 125°C
- Able to measure humidity range from 0 to 80%RH
- Alert user of critical temperature detection / temperature deviation
Most temperature monitoring system are equipped with an alert function to notify the user of a temperature deviation in the storage environment due to possible scenarios such as e.g., forgetting to close the fridge, or cooling system going offline. The alert can help to save large amount of these food assets, especially for businesses.
As various food products must be stored in different temperature range, businesses will often find themselves managing several cold room, freezers, and chillers for their food assets. So, a wireless temperature monitoring system would be ideal as opposed to the default temperature monitoring vendor that comes along with the cold room.
A wireless solution would be able to provide a comprehensive temperature monitoring across cold rooms, freezers, and chillers; basically, all your cold storages’ environment can be monitored from a single screen. Thus, eliminating the need to switch between systems to monitor your cold room and freezers.
This convenience frees up manpower that was previously required to perform the monitoring of all your cold storage, and that manpower can be allocated elsewhere to improve productivity.
At the end of the day, a temperature monitoring system is not only a necessity to protect your seafood, meat, or vegetable assets. It also brings about a good return-on-investment by preventing the loss of assets and enhancing efficiency.