Tha Challenges
To address the universal challenge of food waste, the grocery retailer wanted a view into how its time-and temperature-sensitive goods were transported and stored, aiming to improve its reputation for excellence by guaranteeing produce availability at peak freshness.
The Solutions
The Wiliot Intelligence Platform revolutionizes how grocery retailers monitor the temperature and location of their inventory, offering comprehensive insights down to the case level through automated, continuous monitoring and instant, actionable alerts.
How it Works
Wiliot IoT Pixels were applied to cases of strawberries, tracking their temperature and whereabouts from the distribution center, through transit, to multiple stores, providing high-resolution insights into the state of their goods.
The Outcome
The Wiliot Intelligence Platform promptly detected temperature and process compliance issues, allowing the retailer to tackle underlying problems as they arise, minimizing wasted inventory and ensuring fresher produce with more predictable availability.
The Benefits
Insights delivered by the Wiliot Intelligence Platform guaranteed that the retailer’s produce met the highest standards of freshness and quality, directly enhancing customer trust and enabling systematic elimination of food spoilage and waste causes.
What's in the case study
Challenge
400,000+ reusable assets move between suppliers and the line, with no reliable count of how many exist or where they are. Empty totes that don't come back drive roughly $3M a year in chargebacks and costly cardboard repack. And the hardest assets — enclosed metal bins and layered racks — stay invisible to scan-based tracking. The goal was to prove Wiliot could read them against an 85% commitment.
Solution
Wiliot applied our battery-free IoT Pixels — two to four per asset — reading continuously across staging, dock, and a sealed trailer on low-cost Bluetooth infrastructure, with no scanning and no fixed gates. Redundant tagging on opposite faces meant that when metal shadowed one tag, the other held the read, so the asset was never lost — even inside a sealed trailer with the doors closed.
Key Areas of Focus
The validation spanned the full RF range: 139 assets across 9 types, from open plastic totes to fully enclosed metal bins, tracked continuously across staging, dock, and transit. IoT Pixels report location every few minutes and stream to the Wiliot Physical AI Platform, which turns the raw reads into live location, dwell time, and exception alerts the team can act on.
Results and Findings
Every asset type beat the 85% bar by a wide margin: 99.6% average visibility at the 15-minute SLA, and 100% of assets detected. On the enclosed metal bins scan-based tracking couldn't read at all, IoT Pixels delivered 100%. Deployed across three sites and 40,000 assets, the solution pays back in under a year — $1.1M in annual savings and 117% first-year ROI — led by roughly $975K in avoided cardboard repack and chargebacks, with the rest from reduced shrinkage, faster mis-ship resolution, and scan-free handling.
See what continuous, scan-free visibility could recover in your returnable-asset network.
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