AgroFresh and Zest Labs Collaborate for Comprehensive Freshness Management

AgroFresh Solutions and Zest Labs have teamed up to enhance the companies’ end-to-end solutions. AgroFresh will integrate Zest Labs’ Zest Fresh™ solution into its FreshCloud™ Transit Insights platform. The agreement will take advantage of both companies’ resources and strengths to provide customers with a comprehensive solution that improves operations, increases visibility into produce shelf life, and reduces food waste.

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Research Finds Produce Freshness Varies

New research has found that the freshness of produce at U.S. grocery stores varies significantly from one grocery store to the next, as well as within individual stores. The study, conducted by the agricultural tech firm Zest Labs between February and May, measured and compared shelf life of produce being sold at major grocery chain stores across the country. It was based on random samples of strawberry clamshells, hearts of romaine lettuce and packaged salad mixes purchased throughout the research period from eight major U.S. grocery store chains. Its aim was to document some of the conditions that contribute to premature produce spoilage.

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Big Differences in Produce Shelf Life, Study Finds

Produce shelf life can vary widely between supermarkets and about half of the products sampled in a recent study spoiled prematurely, according to new research from Zest Labs. Zest Labs said Monday that it examined random samples of strawberry clamshells, hearts of romaine lettuce and packaged salad mixes purchased from eight major U.S. grocery store chains between February and May. The study — titled “Half-Bad Is Not Good” — found that the freshness “varied significantly” from store to store and within individual stores, leading to early spoilage.

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Zest Labs Finds Shelf Life Varies Significantly at Retail

Retail research conducted this year by San Jose, Calif.-based Zest Labs finds big variability in the shelf life of strawberries, romaine lettuce and packaged salads. Zest Labs tested the three items at eight U.S. retail chains from February to May, and found shelf life varied significantly from store to store and at each location.

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Fresh Food Supply Chains Go Digital

Retailers gained new capabilities to improve freshness and reduce waste thanks to a partnership between two industry innovators. AgroFresh and Zest Labs are collaborating to strengthen their unique solutions which give retailers increased visibility into their entire fresh supply chain.

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AgroFresh Collaborates with Zest Labs

The two post-harvest companies are working together to improve freshness and reduce waste throughout the supply chain. AgroFresh is set to incorporate Zest Labs’ Zest Fresh solution into its FreshCloud Transit Insights platform. The agreement will pool the companies’ resources and strengths to offer customers a comprehensive solution to improve operations, increase visibility concerning shelf-life and reduce food waste.

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AgroFresh and Zest Labs Collaborate for Comprehensive Freshness Management

AgroFresh Solutions and Zest Labs™ announced today a strategic collaboration between AgroFresh and Zest Labs to strengthen their end-to-end solutions. AgroFresh will incorporate Zest Labs’ Zest Fresh™ solution into its FreshCloud™ Transit Insights platform. The agreement provides customers with a comprehensive solution that improves operations, increases visibility into produce shelf life and reduces food waste.

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AgroFresh and Zest Labs Partner on Sales Solutions for Global Markets

AgroFresh Solutions, Inc., a major player in produce freshness solutions, and Zest Labs, Inc., an AgTech company modernizing the post-harvest fresh food supply chain, have announced a new partnership. Through their collaboration, the corporations say they aim to strengthen their end-to-end solutions.AgroFresh says it will incorporate Zest Labs’ Zest Fresh solution into its FreshCloud Transit Insights platform.

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AgroFresh and Zest Labs Collaborate for Comprehensive Freshness Management

AgroFresh Solutions, Inc., a global leader in produce freshness solutions, and Zest Labs™, Inc., an AgTech company modernizing the post-harvest fresh food supply chain, announced today a strategic collaboration between AgroFresh and Zest Labs to strengthen their end-to-end solutions. AgroFresh will incorporate Zest Labs’ Zest Fresh™ solution into its FreshCloud™ Transit Insights platform.

“AgroFresh’s offering of Zest Fresh is significant as they are a trusted global expert in post-harvest science with over 3,500 customers worldwide and can quickly expand Zest Fresh into new markets and with new types of fresh produce,” said Peter Mehring, CEO of Zest Labs. “Our collective science-based, data-driven solutions and shared market vision for ensuring delivered freshness and reducing food waste provide a foundation for a successful partnership.”

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Is IoT The Missing Link for Blockchain in the Supply Chain?

When it comes to implementing blockchain for fresh food supply chains, has reality set in? Back in late 2017, a mere 18 months ago, blockchain was seen as a messiah, of sorts, for food safety and traceability. It was hard to go a day without seeing an article in the press about it. Blockchain was going to solve all of our supply chain problems for freshness, traceability and food safety. Has it? And, if not, what’s holding it back?

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What’s New in Retail Tech

“Products become more at risk the longer they are away from harvesting,” says CEO Peter Mehring. Using IoT sensors inserted into pallets at harvest, the Zest Fresh system provides growers, shippers, and grocers with autonomous, end-to-end cold supply chain visibility. Combined with cloud-based predictive analytics and machine learning, the sensor-equipped pallets and corresponding database improve freshness management from field to store, says Mehring. It also improves traceability in regards to food safety.

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IoT Offers a Fresh Solution for Tackling Food Waste in the Supply Chain

About 40 percent of America’s food gets wasted between farm and table. Food waste contributes eight percent of global greenhouse gas emissions to our atmosphere. Additionally, food waste going to landfills has subsidiary environmental impacts that often go overlooked. For every piece of food wasted, the resources that went into growing and producing that food — the land, water, labor, fertilizer, and energy — is wasted along with it. IoT sensors – coupled with predictive analytics and machine learning – are being deployed to track food through supply chains to reducing waste.

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Eating Ugly: The Food Waste That Could Refeed America

Waste impacts the environment, wasting resources including water and land. Solutions such as Zest Fresh can help reduce food waste. Learn how Zest Fresh can help improve sustainability, cut waste and get more fresh food to feed more people in this video from Huffington Post.

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Artificial Intelligence and the Fresh Food Supply Chain

By appropriately utilizing AI, machine learning and predictive analytics to know the actual remaining shelf-life of produce, grocers can more accurately plan for when and where to send it. As a result, there are fewer “surprises” because guess work is taken out of the equation. This smooths out the bumps in inventory management and improves supply chain visibility. 

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Blockchain Advancements: Technology of Choice in Foodservice Traceability Rises

“Blockchain technology makes it helpful for supply chain applications where you want to securely share information among multiple entities from producer to the restaurant or retailer, for example,” says Kevin Payne, VP of Marketing at Zest Labs, a provider of technologies that help keep product fresh throughout distribution. “And with blockchain, you can control who sees particular sets of data.”

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Zero Waste Initiatives are a Top Trend

Technology is helping track and monitor perishables from grower to distributor, and on to the restaurant. It is up to restaurant chains to ask suppliers and distributors to implement such technology. IoT sensors, in fact, can go a long way toward this goal, monitoring cooling, freshness and the time it takes for produce to go from field to work. Zest Fresh is an example of a technology solution that’s being deployed to help monitor and ensure freshness going back to the source.

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Big Ideas: “We can greatly reduce food waste by modernizing our delivery system” with Peter Mehring CEO of Zest Labs

In a series on “Big Ideas That Might Change The World In The Next Few Years” Authority Magazine interviewed Peter Mehring. the CEO and a co-founder of Zest Labs. Peter has led Zest Labs’ efforts in pioneering freshness management solutions for the cold supply chain. The company’s Zest Fresh solution improves food quality, reducing waste, and benefiting the environment by modernizing the food distribution and delivery system.

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The Search for a Connected Supply Chain

Produce is a category that’s ripe for IoT. While the technology has been used to monitor irrigation, fertilizer, and weeds for some time, it hasn’t been used post-harvest until recently. Today, IoT allows growers, carriers, and retailers to better track produce shelf life from the moment it’s picked. For example, Zest Labs provides technology that helps reduce up to 40 percent of food waste annually at the retail and consumer level. “Many variables in agriculture—the temperature in the field when produce is picked, how long and in what temperature pallets sit while they’re being loaded—have an impact on shelf life,” says Kevin Payne, Zest Lab’s vice president of marketing.

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How Zest Labs Keeps Strawberries Fresh And Out Of Landfill

Fresh strawberries are a favorite for Valentine’s Day. But how much of that fruit actually made it into the mouths of happy consumers? Strawberries are more vulnerable to food waste. Fortunately, Zest Labs has been working closely with strawberry growers to reduce waste throughout the supply chain so that more strawberries end up eaten than tossed.

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Make Your Grocery Game Zero-Waste

Shopping for groceries can be overwhelming. Once you get past the sheer volume of products staring down from the aisles, you’ve got to reckon with their ingredients, prices, and the way the food is packed. For environmentally conscious shoppers, the latter—excessive packaging and the resulting pollution—is especially irksome. Enter the zero-waste grocery store. From monitoring the state of fruit and vegetables as they are being transported to helping grocers stock the optimal number of lettuce heads, technology has a lot to offer grocery stores. For example, Zest Labs can reveal the shelf life of a product by monitoring certain metrics like temperature and harvest conditions.

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