Temperature sensors

• Temperature and humidity sensors are often placed in a cold storage room to monitor the environmental conditions. The placement of the sensor in the room depends on its purpose.
  • If you want to verify the cooling air temperature, the sensor should be placed near the inlet of the cold air.
  • If you want to monitor the worst location in the cold room, i.e., where the fresh produce is the warmest or cool down the slowest, the answer is more complicated. As a rule of thumb, the worst location will likely be far away from the inlet and deep inside boxes or pallets.
• To understand the environment in which the commodity is stored, we advise placing the sensors as close to the commodity as possible. For example, we recommend to place the sensors:
  • Not too close to the entrance door and not too far away.
  • In the middle of the cooling unit.
  • before the crate is taken out of the room!)

Time-To-Pick-Up (TTPU) model

• Digital fruit twins are mathematical models that have been developed to measure how different crops behave or deteriorate at different storage temperatures. They predict the quality evolution of the crops over time.
• The ‘storage life’ is the time the product can still be stored for, i.e. the time until the product reaches the quality threshold for consumption, and is expressed in the app in ‘remaining number of days’.
• In Coldtivate, we calculate the Time-To-Pick-Up (TTPU) model, which is the expected storage life while still assuring that the product will last for at least 12 hours at an environmental temperature of 30 °C. As a result, there is still sufficient time to go to the market and sell the products, once they are taken out of storage.
• Due to the biological variability of fruits and vegetables, the TTPU model should be considered an estimated value of the storability of a product. It is possible that the crates stored in the room have a slightly different remaining storage life than what the model predicts.
• The initial quality of the produce when it is brought to the room plays an important role in determining the TTPU accurately. To be able to predict the quality at check-in as accurately as possible, it is important to answer the question on when the crop was harvested (which appears during the check-in process) honestly.
• The TTPU model uses temperature sensor data to calculate the remaining quality during storage. To incorporate temperature variations in the room, the model regularly recomputes the remaining quality of each crate.