Smashtag Chill is being developed to meet a broad and growing market for temperature monitoring of shipments – ensuring that goods arrive in the best possible condition, and in so doing nurturing the relationship between all those involved in the ‘cold’ chain through easy access to reliable data.
Smashtag Chill evolved from comments made by an existing laboratory equipment customer about problems that they were having, and whether IIOT (Industrial Internet of Things) could be the basis for making both temperature logging more straightforward and the data more accessible.
Since that first idea, we have conducted extensive market research across companies and sectors ranging from pharmaceutical multinationals to artisan foodstuffs suppliers, and including veterinary, life sciences, fresh and frozen produce, importers, exporters as well as packaging companies.
In more than 200 conversations and face-to-face discussions it soon became clear that, while there were solutions in the market, none was really meeting users’ requirements for being easy-to-use, providing useful data and at the same time being cost-effective.
Some of those we spoke to had spent years trying to find an appropriate solution, others had ‘given up’ and just did what they felt was best in terms of thermally-insulated packaging while others just accepted a level of returns without knowing where the problems lay or who was to blame.
Some companies felt ‘under the cosh’ in terms of looming legislation over temperature-sensitive goods or just did not know how to gather the data necessary to establish best practice. Some just passed the problem on to their customers – or at least those customers willing to pay for monitoring!
In parallel and based on the experience the founders of Smashtag have built up of a wide range of IIOT applications, a technical development was initiated taking in rapid-prototyping, concurrent engineering and structured software development as well a range of advanced design tools.
We plan to have initial sample quantities of Smashtag Chill available in Q4 2018, and hope that you’ll be as excited about this new type of temperature monitoring tag as we are!
