Food Temperature Monitoring with LoRaWAN

LoRaWAN® is a long-range, low-power, and wide-area IoT communication technology that allows sending data around wide-area networks. This makes LoRaWAN perfect for use cases that require sending location, humidity, temperature, freefall, and other small bits of information that can be crucial to the sustainability of your products like food such as temperature monitoring.

The Challenge

Regulations of a professional food environment require restaurants to comply with food safety risk management methods like HACCP (Hazard analysis and critical control points), which covers different control points, such as the temperature of cooling equipment. Manual monitoring of cooling equipment is often inaccurate, expensive, and fault-sensitive due to human error and inaccurate records. The challenge is to ensure automated compliance logging and employee alerting. This means that the sensor data needs to be bridged smoothly through to the LoRaWAN Network Server solutions across a global base of restaurants.

LoRaWAN with its wide coverage area and deep penetration is perfect for cold chain solutions. LoRaWAN-based solutions with their low-power/long battery make it easy and cost-effective to track the quality of goods. This makes LoRaWAN one of the easiest technology to choose for monitoring temperature and reacting on time without worrying about maintaining the devices and gateways that monitor food often. Issues may be managed in real-time with IoT cold chain monitoring systems, with a whole infrastructure reacting as a single unit.

Enabling Real-Time Monitoring

It is possible to deploy LoRaWAN on the cloud-hosted network server. Running it in the cloud will ensure higher availability for monitoring and alerting. The monitoring applications ensure that the temperature of coolers and other kitchen equipment stays at an admissible level at all times. Through the network server, you can set up the technology to automatically monitor the temperature of critical equipment in real-time, generate HACCP reports for compliance, eliminate food waste, and increase food safety and productivity of staff. The data can be monitored from any type of device.

Choosing the right solution is critical for smart cold chain monitoring. Some of the points that have to be addressed are:

• Multi-region support: Choosing a network server solution with multi-region support will fulfill global use cases.

• Geolocation services: With LoRa Cloud-supported services, you will be able to determine the location of any LoRaWAN device. 

• Security: With sensitive cargo, it is important to keep your data secure while avoiding any sort of vendor lock-in. Choosing a device maker that can integrate the network server's secure element with pre-injected root keys will allow for more secure and efficient provisioning.
  

Choose the right LoRaWAN-enabled devices that are pre-registered by the device maker, with pre-commissioned root keys. This will make the process of ownership transfer and device activation extremely efficient while being end-to-end secure.