AI-Powered Sensor Alerts: Preventing Fridge Failures Before They Happen
Jul 18th 2025 | by Jack Vanson
Stop Losing Profit to Spoilage and Waste.
Every year, hidden costs drains on your bottom line—both from refrigeration failures and from unsold stock expiring—add up to well over £1 billion in losses across UK hospitality and retail. Safely’s AI-driven analytics, sensor automation and expiry-management capabilities are built to seal these leaks.
Spoilage & Expiry
- Hospitality spoilage (storage failures)
UK hospitality generates 920,000–1.1 million tonnes of food waste annually, costing about £3.2 billion in purchase price. Of that, roughly 21% comes from ingredients that spoil in storage—the very stock your fridges and freezers are meant to protect—equating to about £672 million written off each year. - Retail expiry (unsold stock)
Supermarkets and other food retail contribute around 270,000 tonnes of food waste per year—products that never sell before their use-by dates—and tally up to £740 million in lost inventory value .
Together, that’s over £1.4 billion of food thrown away purely because storage systems fail or stock hits the shelf but never the plate.
The High Cost of Refrigeration Failures
- Minute-by-minute losses
In the UK, a single hour of unplanned electrical or refrigeration downtime can cost up to £8,500—driven largely by accelerated spoilage of high-value perishables. An 8-hour outage can obliterate over £68,000 of ingredients in a busy kitchen. - Mega-scale disaster
When a commercial cold chain breaks down on an industrial scale, the hit can be truly eye-watering. In 2019, a fire at Ocado’s Andover automated warehouse—which handled 10% of its UK fulfilment capacity—destroyed stock worth over £100 million in one incident.
These figures show that whether it’s a few hours of downtime in a single unit or a warehouse-wide catastrophe, broken refrigeration rapidly translates into six- or even nine-figure losses.
Safely’s AI-enabled Solution: Stop Failures & Expiry
- 1. Always-On Sensor Network
Wireless IoT sensors in every fridge and freezer stream temperature readings to the cloud eliminating gaps in your monitoring. - 2. Proactive AI Analytics
- Drift Detection spotlights gradual warming trends before they breach critical thresholds.
- Expiry Alerts ingested inventory data and flag ingredients within your chosen lead time (e.g., 48 hours) of expiry.
- 3.Smart Recipe Suggestinos
When an item approaches its use-by date, Safely’s AI instantly serves up chef-approved recipes that turn potential waste into added menu value, protecting ingredient spend. - 4. Instant, Multi-Channel Alerts
Push notifications, SMS and emails fire off the moment a temperature edge-case or looming expiry is detected—so you can intervene before spoilage sets in. - 5. Centralised Monitoring & Compliance
Gain real-time status across all units and sites through a unified dashboard. AI automation replaces manual logging, streamlining operational efforts.
Ready to Turn Waste into Profit?
Don’t let hidden spoilage and looming expiries eat into your margins. Book a demo of Safely’s AI-powered operational platform—and start recapturing thousands in lost inventory per site, every year.