Quality assurance and quality control administrators can now "reach out and touch" their entire cold chain remotely, especially within vertically integrated organizations. Considering our background as a manager of quality for large manufacturers and retailers of perishable food items, our internal programs went to great lengths to produce products that met the most rigorous of organoleptic and bacteriological standards. There were rigid "hands on" production policies and evaluations that promoted optimum product performance within the confines of our manufacturing plants. However, product integrity was dependent upon the hopes that everyone adhered to SOP's once these foods items migrated through warehousing, distribution and retail networks. Unfortunately, even if they were not necessarily effective tools for specific facets of the supply chain, clipboard checklists and periodic audits have always represented the extended arm efforts of quality control to ensure food safety.

Time and temperature are the primary factors that directly affect product integrity and shelf life, but now quality and risk management personnel have the opportunity to view these aspects of supply chain handling with a real time view. Cooltrax wireless technology provides organizations the ability to set business rules concerning temperature and time parameters and to receive immediately alerts when these rules are violated. Wireless technology can act as your filed inspector, calling you directly when operating procedures are not maintained, regardless of where your products are in the supply chain.

Cooltrax technology offers to industry the ability to employ an unlimited number of wireless sensors to evaluate all the variable conditions that affect product core temperatures. The amount of collective data that Cooltrax acquires from its multiple sensors provides a wealth of information not previously captured. For example, stratification of refrigerated air flows in warehouses, trucks and retail displays prevents a consistent delivery of conditioned air. The net result is fluctuations in temperature that have a negative impact on product quality. Food engineers now have a better arsenal of information to work from when designing processing techniques or packaging types to address the rigors of distribution that products get exposed thanks to the collection of variable data from numerous points within the cold chain. These same data points also provide a predictive modeling capability to quality assurance managers for purpose of accurately measuring product life expectancy.

A Cooltrax technology brings the value of field inspection directly to the QA desk via a real time "all the time" delivery, without the bias and time constraint of evaluation personnel.