BALTIOMRE — Danfoss is partnering with retail technology company Lizard Monitoring to aid North American retailers with their Zero Food Waste (ZFW) goals. Lizard complements Danfoss’s Alsense monitoring suite to ensure continuous temperature monitoring, providing store managers and food safety executives with detailed data on refrigeration performance and environmental compliance.

Globally, if food waste could be represented as its own country, it would be the third-largest greenhouse gas emitter, behind China and the U.S. The resources needed to produce the food that becomes lost or wasted has a carbon footprint of about 3.3 billion tons of CO2.

To minimize food waste, it’s essential to monitor refrigeration systems and individual products to detect and address potential problems before they occur.

"Lizard supplies robust wireless sensor networks to collect data from retail environments and send it to the cloud where it is mined for trends that lead to food waste before they happen," said Terry Cates, cofounder of Lizard Monitoring. 

To accomplish this, Lizard goes beyond traditional control system data collection and is focused on monitoring the product, not just the refrigeration equipment. This data is sent real-time to the cloud and an array of neural networks analyze the data to detect emerging problems as well as long-term trends. 

"We are able to run AI algorithms on every data point," explained Cates. 

As a result, customers receive early warnings and fewer alarms combined with a detailed record of each event and what was done by in store teams in response. 

“Our customers are looking for sustainable solutions and more automation to reduce product loss and labor and energy costs,” said Peter Dee, sales director of food retail for Danfoss North America. “The Lizard solution is highly complementary to the Danfoss Alsense platform and together gives a 360-degree view of your store's refrigeration performance."

Rupert Prince, cofounder and CEO of Lizard Monitoring, emphasized, "The best solution leverages a marriage of data from sensors to tell you what is happening and control system data to tell you why. Our partnership with Danfoss allows an integrated solution that can escalate problems in real-time. This is critical for Zero Food Waste initiatives at scale."