Why Meeting Consumer Sustainability Demands Requires IoT Sensing as a Service

For food retailers and grocers, it’s critical to be cognizant of the fact that consumers are increasingly making purchasing decisions with an eye toward sustainability. Data from Capital One’s Shopping Research Report reveals that more than 177 million U.S. adults are considered eco-friendly shoppers in 2024, up 7.44 percent year-over-year. American consumers are expected to spend $188 billion on eco-friendly products this year. Eco-friendly shopping represents 18 percent of U.S. retail spending as of 2024, and if trends continue, the market is expected to be worth $355 billion by 2032.

On a more granular level, recent research from Glow found that sustainability had a significant influence for more than 31 percent of shoppers on their selection of a grocer or convenience retailer, with 40 percent indicating the same for in-store food and grocery product choices. The study estimated a $13 billion opportunity from consumers switching grocery retailers or brands based on sustainability considerations. Meeting consumer sustainability demands will be imperative for brands to maintain loyalty and capture market share in the years to come.

Serving as a Reliable Sustainability Partner

Since consumers desire to do their part in the fight to curb greenhouse emissions, the organizations best positioned to win their loyalty will be those that serve as reliable partners for helping them reduce their carbon footprint. For food retailers and grocers, taking proactive steps to preserve product quality and eliminate unnecessary food waste is critical to this effort.

All of us have brought home perishable food items like fruit or vegetables that went bad earlier than expected, sometimes just a couple days after leaving the store shelf. Most times it's because of the way the product was stored or handled along the food supply chain, where it was exposed to sub-optimal environmental conditions that accelerated its lifecycle. These products end up being discarded, contributing to the 1,000 pounds of food waste per person that Americans produce each year. Eco-conscious consumers will not purchase from brands with a reputation for selling soon-to-expire food that ends up getting thrown out. All it takes is one poor customer experience to lose their loyalty for good.

This is where investing in Internet of Things (IOT)-enabled digitalization comes into play. IoT Sensing as Service (SaaS) frameworks enable food retailers and grocers to meticulously monitor products for preserving quality and freshness, further ensuring items remain consumable long after they are brought home by customers.

Driving Quality and Freshness Through the Last Mile

IoT SaaS frameworks combine the power of remote IoT sensing and monitoring solutions with artificial intelligence-enabled prescriptive analytics and digitalized task management functionality, creating a holistic and continual workflow that empowers organizations to leverage advanced inventory performance data for reducing spoilage. Placed inside product storage equipment at every touchpoint of the food chain, IoT sensors allow employees to remotely monitor environmental settings in real time to confirm FSMA and HAACP compliance standards are maintained. They also monitor the performance of those storage assets, enhancing optimization of power consumption and automating the detection and prediction of maintenance issues that could lead to a spoilage-causing event.

Automating the monitoring of refrigeration units, display cases, transportation pallets and other equipment employed throughout the food supply chain brings enhanced visibility to the status of food quality along each product’s journey. The raw physical data collected from each IoT device is integrated into a prescriptive analytics platform that provides continuous feedback loops alerting employees about anomalous temperature excursions that could spoil products. Whenever an excursion occurs, the platform’s capabilities generate a series of simplified prescriptive corrective actions. The actionable insights in turn enable retailers and grocers to ensure that products are sold well before they reach peak quality so they stay fresh longer after being taken home by the customer.

Prioritizing sustainable practices has never been more vital amid the acceleration of climate change and environmental disasters. IoT SaaS frameworks are a prime example of how technology can be a driving force for good, allowing food retailers and grocers to uplevel sustainability efforts and put consumer preferences first.

Guy Yehiav is president of SmartSense by Digi, a company that provides food safety critical control point (CCP) monitoring solutions.