ColdLatch for food distributors: chilled and frozen, stores and trucks
Short answer: ColdLatch watches your chilled and frozen stores and your delivery trucks, raises an alert when one stays too warm, and keeps the continuous temperature record your HACCP plan asks for. If you want, it also puts the affected stock on hold in your ERP until someone has decided what happens to it.
ColdLatch was built first for medicine wholesalers, where the rules are strictest. A food distributor has the same moving parts: cold rooms, freezers, trucks, stock with batch numbers, and an inspector or a customer who asks to see the record. The same product fits, with food limits instead of pharma ones.
What you get
- Every cold room, freezer and truck on one screen. Each is one monitored point with its own limits. New profiles start from the usual ranges, 0 to 4 °C for chilled food and -18 °C or colder for frozen, and you set them to your own HACCP plan.
- Alerts without the noise. Loading a truck or a defrost cycle warms a room for a few minutes. An alert is raised only when readings stay out of range for longer than the delay you set. It goes out by email, Slack, Microsoft Teams or to your own system.
- Deliveries as well as stores. A shipment has its own logger and its own list of goods. If a truck runs warm, the goods on board are held when they arrive, not released into the next warehouse.
- The stock, not only the temperature. When a store has an excursion, ColdLatch lists what was in it and proposes a hold for each batch. With SAP S/4HANA the hold is posted for you; any other ERP or warehouse system connects through the integration API.
- A record you can hand over. A temperature log for each store, day by day, with the lowest, highest and mean temperature and a line to sign. A PDF per excursion, one PDF for any period, and how complete the readings were. Every decision carries a name, a time and a reason, and the log cannot be edited afterwards.
- Where the losses come from. Reports show which rooms spend the most time out of range, at which hours excursions start, and what the stock put at risk was worth at your own prices.
What you need
- Loggers that can send their readings. ColdLatch is software and works with any logger or gateway that sends readings over MQTT or HTTPS, and with LoRaWAN sensors through The Things Stack. Tell us what you have, or ask us before you buy.
- Optionally, a link to your stock system. Without one you keep a simple list of what each store holds, and holds are confirmed by hand.
What it costs
Monitoring without an ERP connection is €99 a month for the whole company with up to 10 monitored points, and €12 a month for each further one, up to 50. With the ERP connection it is €349 a month for up to 10 points and €849 for up to 50. Users and sites are unlimited, the reports are included, and the first 30 days are a free pilot. The full list is under pricing.
What it does not do
- It is not a HACCP system. There are no cleaning checklists, supplier records or hazard analyses in it: it covers the temperature control points and the stock they affect.
- It does not include the loggers, and there is no phone app or SMS yet. Both are on the roadmap.
- Probe checks done by hand, such as a core temperature at goods-in, are not recorded in it.
This page describes the product, not your legal duties. Your own HACCP plan and the food law that applies to you decide what you must record.
Next: Connect any ERP or warehouse system to ColdLatch: the integration API