Delivering fresh vegan meal kits, snacks and smoothies in boxes to homes, and prepared dishes and drinks to store shelves every day is no picnic. Expectations are high, and a lot can go wrong.

New York-based Daily Harvest ships fresh fruits, vegetables and grains daily from farms and warehouses to build easy-to-make meals prepared in minutes, as well as grab-and-go munchies and smoothies at stores like Ralph’s, Kroger, Wegman’s Target and Costco. Ingredients move under strict temperature controls, for the sake of both safety and shelf life.

Managing suppliers is easier when you’re the customer and end user; less so when you’re shipping downstream into regional distribution and retail channels with trucks and warehouses you don’t control.

As Daily Harvest scaled up from home delivery to mass retail, that out-of-control feeling raised concerns. Were shipments remaining within the strict temperature ranges required as volumes increased and schedule reliability was increasingly important?

The company decided on a solution: location and temperature sensors that tracked shipments at the SKU level end-to-end, first inbound to production and assembly points, then outbound to homes and stores. After engaging with several different companies, they decided to work with Tive, a cloud-based freight tracking platform.

Working closely with a Tive specialist team, they developed a cost-effective strategy for continuous monitoring of shipment temperatures to measure performance among their inbound warehouses and downstream distribution channel partners. 

Daily Harvest vice president for supply chain Wesley Williams and Tive sales director Raj Naja describe the collaboration, from technology to buy-in and process changes. Read about the implementation – and the impressive results that followed.