Data-Driven Cold Chains: Enhancing Efficiency, Reducing Waste, and Meeting Sustainability Goals

In this episode of the *Sustainable Supply Chain* podcast, I sit down with Karl McDermott, Chief SaaS Officer at DeltaTrak, to dive deep into the complex world of cold chain logistics and explore how data is transforming this critical industry. With 35 years under their belt, DeltaTrak has moved from paper-based temperature monitoring to real-time data, unlocking insights that are reshaping how fresh and frozen goods travel across the globe. 

Karl unpacks the evolution of temperature tracking tech – from USB loggers to advanced real-time monitoring. These innovations enable better control over temperature-sensitive products, reduce waste, and improve food quality. We also discuss the impact of climate change on the cold chain and how rising global temperatures place added pressure on logistics.

An intriguing point Karl brings up is the industry’s shift from traditional temperature standards (like -18°C) to more energy-efficient options, as well as the integration of real-time data to predict shelf life, calculate carbon emissions, and enable new insurance and financing models. Plus, with regulations like FISMA 204 in the US and sustainability demands in the EU, there’s no doubt compliance is driving change, but DeltaTrak is turning that compliance into competitive advantage.

If you're interested in the intersection of technology, sustainability, and supply chain management, this episode is packed with insights. Join us as we unpack the future of cold chain with a seasoned industry leader.

 If disruption hit tomorrow, would you know where your supply chain was most exposed? In 15 minutes my free scorecard helps you assess 27 resilience statements, calculate your score, and turn the result into three priorities and a 30 day action plan. You can download the scorecard free at tomraftery.com/scorecard.

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If we went back five years, the Chief Sustainability Officer didn't exist. And, obviously for any public company, any large organization, now that's a given, not just from the regulatory side, but on one of your previous podcasts, it's really a consumer driven desire, right? Consumers are, giving more attention, more of their buying power to companies that can prove their sustainability credentials across the board Good morning, good afternoon, or good evening, wherever you are in the world. This is the Sustainable Supply Chain Podcast, the number one podcast focusing on sustainability and supply chains, and I'm your host, Tom Raftery. Hi everyone. Welcome to the sustainable supply chain podcast. My name is Tom Raftery and with me on the show today, I have my special guest, Karl. Karl, welcome to the podcast. Would you like to introduce yourself? Yes, thank you, Tom. Thank you for the introduction. Yeah, great to be on the podcast and be invited as a guest. Karl McDermott, I'm the Chief SaaS Officer of DeltaTrak, a California, Pleasanton based company, focusing on cold chain logistics. Okay. Interesting title, Karl. I don't think I've come across someone with the title Chief SaaS Officer before. What does that entail? Basically, you know, DeltaTrak's a company that's been in business for 35 years. Always in the cold chain space. Since paper based temperature recorders, and obviously we've seen, you know, waves of innovation. You know, we moved to USB style recorders, you know, which would print a PDF when they arrived at a receiver or grocer. Then six years ago, there was this big convergence around, obviously real time data, you know, using the cell network as the data carrier and temperature. And so what it's done is created lots of data. So my job is Chief SaaS Officer is to take the data and build it into relevant services that you know, our customers can use. So it could be cargo insurance. It could be claims, you know, documents and claims management from produce. It could be anything around trade finance or receivables finance. So I'm trying to enable all these SaaS style services under one umbrella to make it really easy to use them, and, and kind of deliver the value that we expect. So that's kind of in a nutshell, my Chief SaaS officer. Yeah, right. Not very common, but I'm happy with the title and happy with what I do. Nice, nice, nice. And tell me a little bit about DeltaTrak. I mean, company size, markets that they serve, typical customers, you know, any, anything like that, that you can fill out the details for We're based in Pleasanton in the East Bay. Been in business 35 years, probably around run rate 40 million a year. The customers we serve really are, you know, everyone and everyone in produce from the smaller farmers, you know, producer growers, the suppliers all the way through to some of the largest grocery chains. So, you know, if I'm talking about, you know, household names, you brands that people trust day in, day out, you know, Dole Fresh Foods is one, Del Monte, Sunkist, you know, kind of the well known brands in, in, in produce, as well as some of the bigger receivers, you know, we have Kroger, as a customer in the US, Costco, and it's really how do we kind of, one, manage the cold chain, make sure we get the logistics right, and two, I think one of the big issues is how do we kind of then start sharing this data In a more collaborative way. So it's not duplicated, and people can then start to build trust, you know, at every stage of the value chain. So that's a little bit about who we are and kind of the type of customers we serve. Obviously, we're an international operation were based in the US but you know, that's probably where we have the largest concentration of customers. But we've got 10 operating offices around the world. Significant presence in Japan, China, Europe, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Chile. Some other countries have making in Mexico, Canada, US. So that would be, you know, where our strength as a company is in from an operating space, right? And if you overlay produce on those countries, you start to see the flows, right? So that, you know, we've really grown where, you know, the produce flow, you know, starts and ends if you like. Nice. Nice. And the cold chain industry itself has seen significant changes over the last decade or more. How do you think rising global temperatures and increasing sustainability goals are shaping the future of cold chain management? Yes. Great question. So what we're seeing across the board is there has to be. There's two things happening, or maybe there's actually three. But the first one is, you know, from what we've seen from the science based data is that the earth is warming up. And I think, you know, if you go back to COP 28, which was in the Emirates last year, you know, it was, you know, I think we say last year was the hottest on record. I think gone to 1.5 Celsius above. I think from the Paris Accord, I think that break point was we don't want to go over two degrees Celsius from the pre industrial age. We're quite close to that already. So I think, you know, what you're seeing in say North America is your summer periods are warmer than they were. You're getting more turbulence in terms of weather conditions in some other parts of the year. So, you know, heavier rains typically, and all of that puts extra stress on the supply chain itself, but also the temperature components of managing the supply chain. So if we're talking about fresh produce, so we kind of classify the industry into fresh and frozen. Fresh produce is probably the most at risk there because it has to be handled within a very specific tolerance in order to go through all those stages of the supply chain and end up, you know, at a grocer with a consumer being delighted by the product. What we're seeing science based data is temperature change is happening. We can see it and we need to do a better job then of actually managing the cold chain specifically if we want to improve 1) product quality, okay? And the counter side of that is reduced waste, right? If we improve improve quality, then the way should go down. So managing the cold chain from end to end is becoming, you know, a priority. So, that's kind of what we're seeing across the board. And it's just not just North America. I think you're seeing that from containerized shipping going from different parts, right? You know, we've seen the Panama Canal drying out. We've seen some of the issues in the Middle East that's adding maybe, you know, two weeks, three weeks to journey times again. All of that needs to be factored in now on what you're doing with your reefer settings, which is, you know, either on the truck or on a container, the critical part of managing your produce from end to end. And in terms of fresh versus frozen, what kind of temperature ranges are we talking about? Yeah, so, frozen. Let me cover off the easy one first. Frozen. So frozen typically is around minus 18. It changes a little bit commodities. and there is a move. There's a quite important actually just to mention this for the audience is a move to minus 15. So instead of setting everything at minus 18 frozen. In fact, there's some some good content around this, is trying to go to a minus 15 standard. And obviously that saves some energy, and what they're looking for is save energy, say, make the footprint more sustainable without significantly changing the quality of the frozen goods. Now, you know, I've seen specific cases, you know, frozen beef going out from Brazil or frozen produce, you know, maybe it's berries, you know, that reefers, reefer failures that it's part of life, right? I mean, what we're trying to do with the real time data is to make sure we can have, real time, you know, timely opportune actions to solve it while it's on route before the product gets, catastrophically damaged. That's what we try to do with cold chain. So, you know, the, the, the frozen is, if you have the, the, the cold chain trackers on there, it's real time, you know. And a reefer breaks down, you can obviously call the carrier, call the, the 3PL or freight forwarder and try and get them to fix it. That's kind of one of the benefits of having real time versus, you know, your traditional data loggers. You know, that's the move on, frozen. And, you know, I think there's some pretty good science around, you know, moving from minus 18 to minus 15 is not going to significantly de damage the quality or the food safety angle of the products. Produce. I mean, when I'm saying fresh produce is somewhat different. So if we go to the US, the US mandates, US, USDA, so it's the, the US agricultural Authority, that certain produce has to be managed at a specific temperature for shipment. So, you know, shipping cucumbers is different from tomatoes, which is different from berries, which is different from apples. So not only do you have to have, the skill set to make sure that the reefer temperatures are dialed into like an up down around that range. You know, a reefer works just like a fridge, right? It goes on for a while, cools down, turns off, the load's gonna, warm up a bit. And that cycle of going up and down is happening over, you know, X number of minutes, X number of hours, X number of days. And obviously we're trying to manage then the reefer temperature around the mandated, ideal temperature of the goods. as per the regulatory authority, right? You know, USDA for the for the US. So again, that that's kind of one of the some of the challenges we see, you know, if it's, just trying to think off the top of my head tomatoes, it might be, you know, somewhere around, I think, 34 Fahrenheit. I'm trying to do the math to Celsius. Roughly around those temperatures. It's just, you know, it's not freezing, not getting to that point, but just over that point to keep it, you know, in optimal conditions. And the, minus 18 versus minus 15 would going to minus 15 put frozen food in danger if a reefer failed, wouldn't it get to thaw out faster going from minus 15 to 0 versus minus 18. Yep. That's a good point. So the counter side of moving from minus 18 to minus 15 is your your time to to getting to a four point is obviously going to be shorter. So basically, you've got an option there is like, how quickly then can I react to that and fix it? And is it fixable? So while we take off some of the, the, you know, the economic costs of, you know, a, minus 18 as a more, if you like, heavy carbon footprint, because you've got the reefer temperatures dialed up more, it's consuming more energy, therefore, you know, it costs more from a social or economic perspective, minus 18, what you're trying to do there is balance out, like, how quickly can I react to a problem and then solve it? And I'm trying to look for some stats. I think minus 15 I think it's 1.3 billion tons of food waste, that we could kind of solve through basically keeping the temperatures within the range. And I think the greenhouse gas emissions, if I remember correctly, is around a saving of 41%. So it's quite significant in frozen. No, interesting, interesting. And just left field question here. Is there any difference between having something at minus 18 and let's say minus 30, as in for refrigeration units can be seen as a, an, an energy storage system. So, for example, connected to the grid at times when electricity is in abundant supply, and it's cheap, you could suck in a load of electricity, drop the temperature to minus 30, and then, when electricity becomes more expensive, let the compressors go offline for a while, let the temperature drift to minus 18 and that way you're saving money and putting less stress on the grid. Is that a factor that anyone is thinking about at all and would going to minus 30 put the food in any or minus 40, or minus 90, or whatever it is, would it put any stress on the food that would actually make it worse? Yeah, I'll take that question probably taken in a different angle or take it to a different direction. So, if you're looking at the supply chain and I'm specifically looking at the movement of goods, I'm not talking about the warehouse side where, you know, maybe it's fixed assets and you can connect to a grid. Now, what's happening, you know, in a typical shipment. So let's say Mexico to the US, it's going on a truck. Now, if we electrified the truck, and use the electricity from the trucks, batteries to do the reefer rather than, you know, using the engine basically to generate electricity. Obviously, that would help from a sustainability perspective, right? And the same happens in the container world. So if we're shipping, you know, containers out from Chile, maybe they're going to Rotterdam, you know, it's going to be loaded onto a truck, delivered to the port, sent through the port network arriving to Rotterdam. You know, maybe there's some transhipment points on the way where, you know, containers get moved from one vessel to another. What I saw in the port industry a couple of years ago, there is a big move to, to what they're calling electrification or using alternative fuels like hydrogen. So, you know, I think there are some alternatives out there which can make sure that the reefer is getting the right if you like the right electricity or the right volume of electricity to maintain the temperature, but it's being generated from alternative fuels. So I think that that's actually something more important, at least the world that I live in, rather than, you know, maybe just, you know, going to a blanket minus 30 when electricity is cheaper. Sure. Sure. No, that makes sense. We're seeing a surge in the use of sensors, obviously, and monitoring technology in supply chains. What do you think are the most important innovations that will drive the next wave of efficiency and sustainability in the cold chain industry? Yeah, great point. So I think at the beginning of the program, I talked about, you know, what's happened in these different, you know, waves of innovation, if you like, in, in cold chain paper based recorders and then the USB PDF printouts, which, by the way, is still being used quite heavily in the industry. And then obviously this moved to real time. So real time allows us to do lots of different services, lots of value added services. And one of those is obviously taking the data from the real time logger. Because that's giving you, you know, the journey. It's not just giving you temperature, humidity, shock, it's giving you locations, giving you ETAs, when products are due to arrive. But it's also giving you some data that you can convert very, very quickly into a carbon emission calculation, a carbon, carbon emission report. And obviously depending on which geography you are. So, you know, California, and you've got a couple of props there, I think it's 253 261. 253 specifically tells you, you know, if you're over this size of company globally, and you do business with California, you need to do carbon accounting now. So one of the great innovations that we have in the industry right now is taking the data that we have and converting it into a carbon emission report. And And we're doing that very, very quickly, very simply, and basically making that task of creating trusted carbon emission calculations a lot easier than was done in the past. I just wanted to wind that back a bit. So, you know, you know what you've seen, I think, in the last five years, Tom is obviously the industry is looking to try to bring more regulation. So California, the SEC has been discussing it. The SEC is a little bit more focused around risk management, rather than specifically asking for carbon emission accounting, but it's like disclose to us all the risks you have, including your climate related risks. Okay. And that's what the SEC is going to bring out this year, but it's going to be come back in one and the same. You have to basically make the processes of your carbon emission calculations more robust. EU is doing something similar with the, you know, the, the port calls and the ETS system, which is the, you know, their trading system for carbon credits. And that's given rise, obviously, with all this additional regulation of a new role, like the Chief Sustainability Officer, you know, that didn't exist five years ago. So we're trying to make his or her life a lot easier because you know what they're doing today in their in their sustainability reports or ESG reports is they have an Excel and they have a macro and they're saying, Well, we've got 10,000 shipments a year. The average is this. This is the consumption of a truck. This is the consumption of a container vessel. Here's your calculation. So the fact that we can now use data to bring together a trusted calculation that can be used as part of your financial reporting for, for carbon emissions. That's, I think, a huge, huge benefit. So that's one area that we're looking at. Another is, and I think it comes back to some of the topics that, you know, regularly crop up on your, your show, around AI and ML. So one of the things that we are doing is taking the, the data again, from the temperature loggers in real time and running it through an ML style algorithm based on USDA respiration curves in order to predict quality of goods, the grading and look at like an example of like, you know, calculating the shelf life. Again, everything we're trying to do around, the food or produce industry is around quality. It's around, you know, food quality, food safety, which is a bit more of the FDA focus and obviously reducing food waste and the carbon footprint and doing that, you know, that's giving nutritious products for consumers to love and eat. So again, just going back to the algorithm, I think what we can do with that is basically ensure that we can predict shelf life at any point in the supply chain until it arrives to the receiver, the grocery chain. And then if it is like in a product at risk, we can go and make sure that the QA and inspection process is dialed into that particular shipment or that particular pallet in order to bring the, if you like, the inspection process into the overall, you know, looking at like food and food, quality. But also then change some of the downstream operations. Okay, so produce that before was basically going out on a first in first out model in the warehouse can get prioritized to closer stores, shorter routes for the truck, and you can basically start to ramp up your digital promotions for certain categories of produce that's coming through the supply chain, but has less days shelf life in order to make sure that the consumers still get a quality product. The FDA actually decided in 2019 to mandate a kind of new style of best before date. And again, if you, you know, we've all been to the supermarket, we all see a date. No one really understands what that date is, right? Is it like the date it can be sold? Is it consumption? Leave it in the fridge? So what they've tried to do is, in the FDA, it's a, it's peak quality up until this date. So you're going to get a standardized quality of produce up until this date. And that's part of the consumer education we're also doing, to ensure that, you know, consumers also understand how long produce can actually be, stored for safely in the fridge before it's going to a waste. And going back to your question, there's a couple of examples around how we're using the data in order to drive new services, you know, as around sustainability, carbon emission reporting around, you know, shelf life and, and, and obviously, you know, the best, best before used by dates. Other ones are in the financial sphere. So we're working with Marsh globally. They're taking our data, and traditional loss rates. And then using it to create a new profile, risk profile for either the shipper or the receiver. And based on that, then they're looking at maybe adjusting terms. So if you're a company that can prove in the trade lanes that you're operating, that historically you've got very low temperature exceptions and low claims, you know, you should get a better rate or better terms than a company that's, you know, basically shipping the same but has maybe double the loss rates. And we can see this on trade lanes. You know, there's, you know, quite a big difference in terms of loss rates on trade lanes and also by carriers on the maritime side. So again, we think there's some big opportunities to again, use the data to unlock new services that, we can now, give some additional benefits and value add to our customers. And I think the same applies to produce finance. I won't call it trade finance. I think it's more specific around factoring. So again, we see a lot of that, you know, Mexico to the US for example, so, you know, if you're working with a big receiver, they're gonna pay you what? 90, 120 days. You know, small companies, small farmer, you know, producer growers. They want to get the cash pretty quickly. So factoring again is a is a good tool. And again, what we what we can do is use the data to tell the story that you know products were delivered on time to the right place at the right delivery window and in premium quality. And that makes it easier then for the financial institutions to basically, you know, do the factoring part and get cash back to the farmer, you know, quicker so they can continue to invest in the next season. Sure. Sure. Yep. Obviously, food waste is a huge issue globally, with huge implications for both sustainability and profitability. What strategies do you think the cold chain industry should adopt to minimize waste while maintaining product quality? Yeah. Great question. I think it's actually, if you're talking about sustainability and then you join, you know, food waste, I think that's the elephant in the room, right? What, what can we do? The key thing there is to look at the different parts of the, you know, if you like the ag food chain from the producer grower to the supplier. Maybe there's a broker involved, and then obviously onto the receiver. And we really need to help develop strategies in order to kind of optimize the chain from end to end, and bring value to each of those activities. And obviously then to each of the, the companies that put resources in the activities to, to get an output, right? So. you know what we're trying to do at each of those stages is to reduce the percentage of food loss. And okay, obviously, the bigger part that we all see, and obviously we experience is that the grocery side right? So, you know, the grocery chain again, you know, 30 to 40% of all food coming through you know, that supply chain is typically going to be wasted. If we can make an impact 5% impact, you know, in terms of like net and above. So bring it down to maybe 25 percent over the next five years. That's a huge benefit, not just from the economic side from the consumer side, but obviously from the environmental side, like less foods going into landfill. And obviously, putting food into landfill is probably the worst thing you can do, because then it starts to decompose and creates methane. So there's a double effect there, so the 5 percent you know, can feed more people. We can do it with maybe less supply chain activity, but we can also reduce some of the methane coming off landfill. So the sensors then can actually be used in each of those steps. But one of the challenges then is to make sure that you get the end to end picture of, who produced the goods, you know, where was it, farmed, packed, cooled, who shipped it, which warehouse received it and then sent on to stores and consumers. So again, getting that overall picture is quite difficult to do today. One of the things in the industry that's kind of critical is FISMA 204. This is again, a new piece of legislation just for the USA, which is focused around traceability. It really talks back to to food safety as much as anything. What they're looking for really is, how do we reduce food based illnesses? And you know, one in six Americans have some kind of issue eating food a year. It does cause a, sadly a series of or number of deaths. So the traceability side is like, can we get to the root cause of the issue quickly? So FISMA 204, you know, it's coming into law in the beginning of January 2026, talks to can we build then that end to end chain with data? So the onus at each step of the way is you've got to be able to produce a sortable spreadsheet with the critical information within a 24 hour period. So again, being able to kind of then stitch together the story of, you know, where it was produced, when it was picked, what's the variety, which parcel of land it was. And then, you know who handled it and transformed it if it's going into like, you know, you know, mixed green salads or going into some kind of, mixed berries or consume, you know, food service again all the way through to the consumer, which could be a supermarket grocery chain or a restaurant outlet. All of those come under the realm of this new law of FISMA 204. And I think moving that traceability dial forward is getting people to think this because how do I share their data up and down the track the chain again? Pre pandemic across the board, you know, and not specifically talking about produce. Sharing data was actually a big problem, right? No one wanted to give up some of the data because they saw it as a key asset I think the pandemic and one of the benefits of the pandemic is it forced people to collaborate together and share data and I think FISMA 204 is going to be that watershed moment that forces, every actor in the supply chain for food, start to share data, you know, feel comfortable about doing it. That's going to help us then stitch together the data sets to make sure that, you know, from a qualitative perspective now that, you know, the food was handled correctly all the way through, from, you know, the cut to cool time in the farm, which is critical on produce. So again, Salinas Valley, if it's cut there, you know, and it's two hours from the time it was cut, I'm talking about maybe a raspberry or strawberry and then delivered to the cooler. That's good practice. Four hours average. If it's over four hours and heading towards six longer or it's been left out, on the truck waiting to be received by the cooling facility, that's going to cause damage right at the early stage of the shipment. And obviously then with the best temperature controls in the world, we're not going to be able to recover any of that, any of that kind of damage. So. Again, there's like a couple of examples there from the beginning of the, this chain with the farmer grower cut to cool and then what we can do maybe in the grocery chain to try and bring down food waste on kind of optimise what we do with the food waste in order to, you know, get it in the right place. Okay, cool. Yeah. Makes sense. And of course the regulatory environment is evolving quickly, especially with new sustainability targets like net zero and various other initiatives. We have CS, CSRD and CSDDD here in the EU. How can companies in the cold chain industry stay ahead of these changes and turn compliance into a competitive advantage? Yeah, great question. And I, you know, it goes back to the point I was making earlier. You know, if we went back five years, the Chief Sustainability Officer didn't exist. And, obviously for any public company, any large organization, now that's a given, not just from the regulatory side, but on one of your previous podcasts, it's really a consumer driven desire, right? Consumers are, giving more attention, more of their buying power to companies that can prove their sustainability credentials across the board. So a Chief Sustainability Officer is looking at it, three levers, right? You know, obviously the regulatory side. So, you know, what you're seeing around, the props in California, what might be hired by the SEC in Europe, they're looking at maybe the competitive advantage side. Okay, if we get ahead of this, is there some additional economic benefits that will come to the company? I'll come on to that in a minute. And then the consumer side, which is obviously consumers are giving in certain demographics, certain territories, certain regions. I think that was what the outcome of the podcast that I listened to, companies who can prove their sustainability credentials, not just carbon emission reduction, if it's produce, tell more of that local story or talk about the provenance of goods, which farm it was on, making sure that, modern slavery, or a safe places to work's been incorporated in basically people going out on the on the fields and picking produce or going to the greenhouse and doing the same. And obviously, you know, certain geographies, I think, again, going back to your point in Europe, that produce hasn't hasn't been grown on deforest land. So that's another kind of set of sustainability. Going back to that middle one, then, which is the competitive advantage, what you're seeing around digitization and digitization has to be what underpins this move towards less food waste, more sustainable, less carbon emissions. And obviously we're trying to get you know, produce that gets into the hand of consumers in optimal condition. But digitization should be able to to do that at a lower price point. So again, one of the things that we've seen again since the pandemic is the ability to share data over API. So the fact that now we can share some of our data between the receiver, like a Kroger and also the supplier and they're seeing the same data sets is something that probably didn't happen five, six years ago. So, we're not having a massive team of back office staff that are sharing this over email. Lots of multiple storage and compute costs for doing that. People get lost in threads. Sharing data over API is actually, I think, you know, digital data is a good leveler to bring down costs and to, to also enable new business models. Companies like HelloFresh, who obviously are looking at the, food and nutrition from a slightly different angle, trying to give you custom meals, meals that are easy to prepare. Obviously, again, there's some kind of demographic and I would say, kind of changes in how we're consuming food, Before it was only restaurants, grocery. Now companies like HelloFresh are actually filling some gaps to say people want nutritious food, but they don't want time to, you know, don't have time or interest to actually go and and buy that on a weekly basis. Why don't we send it to them? Some of this is also bringing in new business models, which I think, it's creating some, some, I would say, new opportunities in, in the grocery sector or food sector per se. Sure. Sure. Sure. Sure. What metrics or KPIs should companies focus on to measure the success of their cold chains? Yeah, I am. Obviously, the first one is, you know, temperature exceptions, right? And it's when we're looking at cold chain or specifically fresh again, frozen, slightly different, easier to manage, but fresh is what you're looking for is not just a peak. It's not. It's gone. It's gone up. Maybe there's a door opening that we've noticed and the temperature went up 10 degrees. It's not critical. It went up 10 degrees. It's how long it's above the threshold. So again, you know, going back to your question, having the data that tells you how long it was over a specific threshold or, or, upper band is critical to, to, to understand then how the, the produce is going to kind of, start to degrade in some shape or form. So managing that as a KPI. So time above threshold is critical. And again, it's gonna be different for different produce. You can imagine berries, avocados, expensive commodities, very sensitive. They're going to be much more susceptible to those changes than maybe, you know, cucumbers and some, some other kind of grocery products. So that's what the other thing you can start doing then is obviously look at dwell time, right? You know, Temperature is one, time in process is another one. So what we're trying to do, look at dwell time is how long was produce stationary, not moving, you know, not going from A to B. And again, you can do that on a truck. You can do it on container basis. You can do it across carriers, your maritime lines, and get a dashboard then of like, who's really performing well. And you can bring those two sets to data. You know, who's good at doing. And it goes back maybe to a note of calculation, right? Which goes that that's more of a truck. But you're looking at temperature exceptions on one side. And then you're also looking at, time in process on the other and trying to manage those. So those are two critical KPIs that we look at with our customers in order to, ascertain whether a shipments going well or not, you know, a perfect shipment almost. So those would be two that I think a critical that we start to look at. Obviously, you know, some of the financial ones, freight spend, etc, etc. That's another good set of like KPIs to look at. Those are the ones I kind of recommend to start initially. Okay. And are there any new technologies out there that you see making a big difference to the industry in the next three, four or five years? Yeah, I'm not going to say it's a new technology. I think it's a new use case. So, when I was talking about, you know, the, these like different changes of technology from the paper based recorders, going to the USB style, that's basically, after the effect, right? And we went to real time. So BLE is actually, an interesting technology because, you know, the price point of a BLE type of sensor is maybe a tenth of a real time sensor. So the BLEs you can deploy at scale, it's a lot cheaper. And so I think people are now seeing to experiment with BLEs in commodities that are less challenging. Okay. Over, you know, maybe, you know, distances that are shorter because it's just a lot more cost effective. So I wouldn't say it's specifically a new technology, but it's a new application of a technology, which I think is, you know, bringing a, if you like, a more robust management of cold chain. Now, the alternative is obviously, using an old style recorder or spending money on a real time or doing nothing at all. And I think, what we're trying to do here in terms of, you know, it would be, you know, competition would be, can we capture some market share then using a BLE type of device that would, be at a price point that, customers are willing to do it. And that still makes sense. You know, and previously they were probably doing nothing at all. So I think BLE is interesting. conversely, you know, moving up the chain, I think some of the devices are becoming more intelligent. So again, you know, it's more like edge computing. There's maybe a move a little bit there in terms of, how much data could be stored on the device, and can the device be linked in some shape or way to the cloud, but also have some local processing capacity, right? To send out alarms or warnings. So again, imagine that there's a there's a small algorithm that sits on the device. And, rather than immediately going up to the cloud, because, you know, there's parts of, Canada, Mexico, US on a truck that doesn't have any cell coverage, it could be then sent to like a Bluetooth device, a cell phone in the cab to say, Hey, the reefer temperature is running, a bit hot. Would you like to have a look at it? So that time to action here is critical, Tom. So that's another area. We've seen that some trade lanes require more than one sensor per container. So if you're shipping out of Chile, again, it's a long journey. And what you're looking there is putting maybe two devices or at one device with a probe that allows you to measure the inlet temperature of the reefer, plus then the ambient temperature at the other end of the container, right? Because there's going to be some differences. Again, the reefer is trying to create cold air to keep everything fresh, but it doesn't distribute that universally, right, across the whole part. So again, in certain geographies, certain trade lanes, having, two devices or one device of a probe or even two probes is making sense because you're getting then a much more complete picture. And again, as the price points drop down, suddenly you can start to see a much more complete look of what the temperature profile was, across 20 pallets distributed through a container and kind of make sure that it's kind of uniform. So those, I think those are three areas that we're seeing from lower end devices, smarter devices, but then how people are using devices that help protect the cold chain and kind of give people the information they want. Nice. Okay. Left field question. If you could have any celebrity or fictional character, alive or dead as a spokesperson for cold chain, who would it be and why? Yeah, that's a great question. I don't know. Let me have a quick think. Top of my head. Richard Branson. So Richard Branson, I think, is 1) he's a huge innovator. Not all of his projects work out, but most of them do. He is committed to innovation. I think he's a, you know, also committed environmentalist. I think he's quite strong on that. So I think, you know, he would be a great spokesperson that could talk around food waste, talk about the sustainability. You know, making sure that everyone gets nutritional food that's a top quality. So he would be, my candidate to become the, the ambassador for the cold chain for the world. Okay, I thought you were going to go with with Frozone from the Incredibles but that was, that ,was, uh, that was low hanging fruit, I guess that'd be another good one. I mean, he could do something really well for, for the, frozen chain. Yeah, exactly. Okay. We are coming towards the end of the podcast now, Karl, is there any question I did not ask that you wish I had? Or is there any aspect of this we haven't touched on that you think it's important for people to be aware of? No, I think we covered off the most critical parts. I think for me, the most important message that I want the audience to kind of pick up is, 1), the industry has made some huge advances over, you know, the last few years around data and the ability to use data and share data. I think that that's the critical thing, collaboration. We know we've got a big problem, and we're not doing enough currently to reduce it from a food waste perspective, or a freshness or food quality perspective or sustainability. So I think now we need to start to, you know, use the data and use it to an advantage of the not just, you know, all the ecosystem participants, but the wider good in order to kind of reduce food waste, you know, improve sustainability in carbon emission reporting and obviously, you know, get the, the kind of produce and products that people, nutritional produce and products that people, you know, are going to eat. So if we can leave with that message, I think it's, you know, something that, the audience should kind of pick up on and hopefully could be a follow on topic for, for someone else to kind of enhance and build on. Nice. Nice. Great. Super. Karl, if people would like to know more about yourself or any of the topics we discussed on the podcast today, where would you have me direct them? Yep. And the best place to contact me is obviously my LinkedIn. So it's Karl McDermott at LinkedIn. You should be able to find my profile. Anything around the company, go to the DeltaTrak website, DeltaTrak. com. Those will be the best two forums. We are active in kind of many of the trade events, so again, if you're in the food or produce industry, and you just want to drop by, you know, shoot the breeze, talk some ideas, you know, come to the stand as well. But those would be the best three places to reach out either LinkedIn, the website, or at a trade show. Happy to chat and converse. Superb. Great. Karl, that's been fascinating. Thanks a million for coming on the podcast today. Yep. Thank you, Tom. It's been a pleasure. And hopefully the, again, the audience gets some, some great value of some of the questions and topics we we've discussed together on the call. Okay. Thank you all for tuning into this episode of the Sustainable Supply Chain Podcast with me, Tom Raftery. Each week, thousands of supply chain professionals listen to this show. If you or your organization want to connect with this dedicated audience, consider becoming a sponsor. You can opt for exclusive episode branding where you choose the guests or a personalized 30 second ad roll. It's a unique opportunity to reach industry experts and influencers. For more details, hit me up on Twitter or LinkedIn, or drop me an email to tomraftery at outlook. com. Together, let's shape the future of sustainable supply chains. Thanks. Catch you all next time.