Manufacturer tracks food storage temperatures with Azure, helps reduce global food waste

Responsible refrigeration

Founded in 1933, Danfoss provides products and services for air conditioning, food cooling, building heating, gas compressors, and more. In 2002, Danfoss joined the United Nations Global Compact, committing to upholding 10 principles related to social and environmental responsibility. Not only does Danfoss produce high-quality products, but it does so in a way that helps decrease energy consumption and food waste.

The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that around 30 percent of global food production, including fruits, vegetables, oilseed, meat, dairy, and fish, is either lost or wasted. This amounts to 1.3 billion tons per year—enough food to feed 2 billion people—but more than 800 million people in the world still face hunger.

To help reduce commercial food waste, Danfoss developed a monitoring service more than a decade ago using Internet of Things (IoT) sensors to help ensure that refrigerators and freezers in grocery stores stayed at the correct temperatures. If a freezer door is accidentally left open and the food gets too warm, grocery stores can lose tens of thousands of dollars of food products. With the monitoring system, store employees receive an alarm notification if the temperature isn’t correct.

However, the IoT data was stored in a US datacenter, and Danfoss wanted to modernize its solution by moving to the cloud. The company aimed to offer a comprehensive software as a service (SaaS) solution to food retailers with faster responses to data and better scalability. “We wanted a scalable and global solution that allows us to onboard new customers anywhere in the world without worrying about server capacity, security, and hosting,” says Thomas Kolster, Head of Service Innovation at Danfoss.

A cloud-based business model

Danfoss adopted Microsoft Azure to move its Alsense Food Retail solution to a SaaS model. Launched in September 2020, Alsense is a cloud solution that food retail professionals use to help grocery stores run more efficiently. Alsense is built on Azure Event Hubs to manage the data between Azure and grocery stores’ sensors.

Danfoss processes two types of data. One type is its telemetry data, which includes temperatures, humidity, compressor performance, and more, and it’s processed in batches and ingested into Azure SQL Database. The company also uses Azure Databricks to gain analytic insights on the data and Power BI for some of its data visualization. Danfoss uses a combination of its own dashboards and Power BI to monitor data and provide a front-end interface that food retail professionals access to understand a store’s data.

The company also processes critical system alarm data (temperatures, leaks, and more), which is sent in near real time instead of in batches. Currently, Danfoss has 14,000 supermarket alarm subscribers, 1 million connected devices, and 1.6 million monthly alarm notifications. Those alarms route to Danfoss call centers and are either processed by machine or sent to a monitoring technician who will immediately dispatch a technician or contact the grocery store. “Alarms offer critical information that we can’t wait hours for, and we can now process alarms in near real time with Azure Event Hubs,” says Kolster.

By building its solution on Azure, Danfoss gained the scalability it wanted, and it also established a new revenue model and way to help its customers. “We started as an engineering company with a traditional transactional business model selling components, and now we’re on a digital journey adding a service business model,” says Kolster. “That requires a different mindset in the way we go to market, and we wanted to continue our trusted relationship with Microsoft on this journey. We were drawn to Azure for its world-class data security, scalability, and elasticity, and we believe it’s a sustainable platform for our Alsense solution.”

Increased operational and energy efficiency

Margins are known to be very tight in the food retail industry, and grocery stores are often searching for ways to reliably reduce costs and streamline operations. Danfoss helps its customers become more efficient by providing key data they didn’t have before, such as how appliances are performing and which stores are consuming too much energy. “Thanks to Azure, we provide insight granularity to our customers at a chain level so they can drill down on specific stores that aren’t performing as they should, investigate the situation, and mitigate it quickly,” says Kolster.

By adopting Alsense, Danfoss customers are already experiencing tangible results. The company estimates that its customers will experience up to a 35 percent decrease in service costs, and they’ll receive up to a 30 percent decrease in energy costs thanks to total net savings on energy costs. Customers can further improve operational efficiency by easing burdens on store managers with as much as an 80 percent reduction on time spent dealing with equipment issues.

One customer that uses Alsense is Acme Markets, a supermarket chain in the eastern United States, which has already experienced an increase in operational efficiency. ”In all actuality, Alsense is saving the company money,” says BJ Appenzeller, Assistant Store Director, Easton at Acme Markets.

Reduced waste and increased access to food

By moving its platform to Azure, Danfoss is supporting its sustainability mission. It’s upholding the UN Global Compact principles to “undertake initiatives to promote greater environmental responsibility” and to “encourage the development and diffusion of environmentally friendly technologies.” By helping its grocery store customers to prevent food waste, Danfoss keeps more food in the supply chain.

Concludes Kolster, “We’ve unlocked new revenue opportunities with our customers, which was the commercial reason for moving to Azure. But more importantly, we’ve codified more than 85 years of domain expertise in the refrigeration industry to provide actionable insights to our customers so they can run their stores more efficiently. With Azure, we’re helping grocery stores reduce food loss by up to 40 percent, improving food quality, and reducing costs.”

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