Cold-Chain Telemetry

The Challenge

A food distributor was moving temperature-sensitive goods across three regions with no visibility between pickup and delivery. Excursions were discovered at the dock — when the pallet arrived too warm, the shipment was already lost. Compliance evidence was assembled by hand from driver logs and thermometers, a process that took days per audit and produced reports nobody fully trusted.

The Solution

We built the full path from sensor to operator:

• Edge hardware — calibrated temperature and humidity sensors with cellular gateways, reporting over MQTT with store-and-forward for dead zones
• Ingestion pipeline — a validating subscriber batching readings into a partitioned BigQuery table, with dead-lettering for malformed payloads and duplicate-safe views for every report
• Alerting — threshold and rate-of-change rules evaluated in-stream, dispatching SMS and email within minutes of an excursion starting
• Compliance reporting — per-shipment evidence packs generated from the same data, exported as signed PDFs for audits

The Results

• 41% fewer temperature excursions — issues caught in transit instead of at the dock
• 9-minute average alert latency from excursion start to operator notification
• 3 regions live on one platform, with per-region retention and reporting rules
• Hours instead of days to assemble an audit evidence pack, with data lineage from sensor to report