Temperature Monitoring with Fuchs Cereals

Taking the leg work out of data logging

With more than 80 years of experience, Fuchs Cereals is a leader in the processing and production of cereal-based produce, which the company distributes to over two dozen countries globally.

The family-run business produces a wide product range of breakfast cereals, muesli mixtures, wheat, flour and bread produce - delivering over 5.5 million kilograms of muesli and breakfast cereals every year.

Fuchs’ success is based on the premium product quality and taste of its products. To ensure that all products meet the highest quality and food regulatory standards, systematic and regular quality control is a vital part of the company’s operations.

The challenge:

Like many companies in the food and drinks sector, environmental monitoring is an essential element of the product development process for Fuchs. Logging regular and detailed temperature updates is vital. The refrigerator cells and freezers need to be kept at a constant temperature to avoid the risk of spoiling.

Previously, Fuchs monitored all of its environmental data manually with physical checks performed by quality control operatives, which was time-consuming, relatively expensive and prone to human error. As a result, Simon Fuchs, Administration and Technics Manager began looking into alternative solutions to simplify the data logging process.

Cost was an important factor, however, Fuchs thought that both the price and quality were of equal importance.

The solution:

It was at this point that Fuchs discovered FilesThruTheAir's EL-WiFi sensor solutions.

Crucially, using the FilesThuTheAir EL-WiFi sensors to communicate the data to the Cloud would provide Fuchs with the opportunity to access their data anytime from anywhere.

Fuchs uses several EL-WiFi sensors across the business, with one data check every six hours. Each sensor communicates via an existing Wi-Fi connection, uploading the data automatically to the Cloud periodically, providing maximum simplicity to the data gathering process.

Fuchs specifically looked for a Wi-Fi solution when taking the next step for the business. This is because a Wi-Fi solution is flexible and scalable. It is also easily implemented – Simon Fuchs wanted a solution that could avoid the installation of a legacy system. This would require multiple cables and can be extremely expensive.

The flexibility and freedom of WiFi:

FilesThruTheAir's sensors offered round the clock monitoring, providing Fuchs freedom from a separate, dedicated IT team to check the data in the time intervals specified. Whilst Fuchs currently has five FilesThruTheAir sensors in place, the system is easily scalable, depending on the peaks and troughs of the business.

FilesThruTheAir also offers a flexible Cloud account. The Cloud account makes sensor data universally accessible from any internet-enabled device.

The company is able to manage its data and make changes to any sensor setting remotely. This gives Fuchs the power to potentially step up its use of data loggers, and monitor the information from hundreds of Wi-Fi sensors from any location.

The benefit:

Using the FilesThruTheAir wireless data collection and monitoring solution allowed the company to monitor and log their data quickly and accurately and provided them with a long-term, cost-effective solution. Fuchs is now planning to roll out even more of FilesThruTheAir's Wi-Fi-connected sensor solutions across the company.

"The system works well, we are able to view the statistics of the temperature in the refrigerated cells easily. The solution saves time, giving the team an immediate check of all cells and data."

Simon Fuchs, Administration and Technics Manager.