Today, Zest Labs announced the availability of three new modularized components of our Zest Fresh for Produce solution, each of which are built on the Zest Fresh platform. The three new Zest Fresh for Produce modules make it simpler and faster for suppliers, restaurants and grocers to trial and deploy our solutions to improve operational efficiency and ensure delivered freshness, while reducing field-to-store food waste and increasing customer satisfaction.

Solving the Food Waste Problem

Food waste is a significant problem. According to the National Resource Defense Council’s Wasted Report, up to 40 percent of the food we produce is never consumed and ends up wasted in landfills, contributing up to eight percent of greenhouse gas emissions. Zest Labs has found that variations in harvest conditions and post-harvest handling and processing during the first 24-48 hours can have a dramatic impact on shelf-life that leads to premature spoilage and waste. This was evident in a recent Zest Labs research study which identified roughly half of food sold at grocery stores included in the study would spoil at the store or with the consumer, leading to customer dissatisfaction and waste.

“Until Zest Fresh, suppliers and retailers lacked a solution that provides real-time, pallet-level data and insights, helping improve their post-harvest and fresh supply chain operations,” said Peter Mehring, CEO of Zest Labs. “The new Zest Fresh modules further extend our ability to positively impact their business and provide a rapid ROI by helping them reduce costs, improve operational efficiency and ensure delivered freshness.”

The New Zest Fresh for Produce Modules

The Zest Fresh platform provides fresh food companies across the supply chain with strategic insights to improve operations and manage freshness at the pallet level. Zest Fresh enhances operational efficiency for suppliers and ensures delivered freshness for restaurants and grocers, reducing field-to-store waste by 50 percent or more and improving customer loyalty. It simplifies and empowers the IoT-enabled supply chain, scaling from simple to complex ecosystems. The Zest Fresh platform is SaaS-based, real-time, event-streaming architecture seamlessly harnesses business information and autonomously collected sensor data enabling the suite of on-demand Zest Fresh solutions. Its dashboards and alerts are optimized for web-based and mobile deployments. The three new modules are:

Zest Fresh | Insights measures produce shelf-life variability and provides awareness and understanding into where shelf-life is lost, what factors are potentially impacting shelf-life, and the changes needed to improve shelf-life consistency, reduce waste and increase product margins. It uses a unique product retention process that collects and evaluates produce samples at the customer’s facility, assessing them daily to determine produce shelf-life variability.

Zest Fresh | Metrics improves product margin and reduces waste by providing suppliers and retailers improved operational visibility and control of their fresh food supply chain. It uses innovative IoT sensors and powerful SaaS-based data analytics to track and monitor produce at the pallet level in real-time from the field to the store, and providing visibility that helps validate the products being shipped meet the predefined process and quality metrics. Zest Fresh | Metrics also helps identify and prioritize pallets based on both harvest quality and process adherence to match long and short transit times.

Zest Fresh | Optima further improves the fresh food supply chain to maximize margin and deliver freshness. The next-generation solution for the fresh supply chain, incorporating the industry’s first freshness metric, the Zest Intelligent Pallet Routing Code (ZIPR Code), uses powerful predictive analytics to dynamically determine the remaining shelf life of product and optimize distribution as it moves through the fresh supply chain to ensure that every pallet of produce meets the customers’ freshness requirements.

Zest Fresh for Produce Availability

The Zest Fresh for Produce modules are available immediately both individually and as a set, making it easy for growers, suppliers, processors, restaurants and retailers to evaluate their current fresh food supply chain and rapidly identify ways to improve operations to improve delivered freshness. Additional information can be found on the Zest Fresh for Produce section of our website or by contacting us.