Amazon Web Services Inc. today shared details about a technical collaboration with Carrier Global Corp. aimed at harnessing the cloud giant’s analytics services and data from connected devices to reduce food waste.

Florida-based Carrier is one of the world’s top makers of air conditioning and refrigeration equipment. Its hardware is widely deployed in, among others, cargo-carrying trucks used to transport perishable goods that need to be kept at low temperatures.

This month, Carrier struck a multiyear deal with AWS for the companies to build an analytics platform for monitoring heat-sensitive cargo atop the AWS cloud. The capabilities of Lynx, as it’s called, could lend themselves to tackling supply chain issues that directly or indirectly lead to food waste.

Food items, like all cooled cargo, are highly sensitive to refrigeration issues. “For example, if fresh food is left on the loading dock and the refrigerated truck is late to pick it up, food could spoil. If the door on a refrigerated container is left ajar, food could spoil,” explained Sarah Cooper, the general manager of outcome driven engineering at AWS.

Maintenance issues can also lead to food spoilage. If a cargo refrigeration unit, or for that matter the truck to which it’s attached, suffers a technical problem midtrip, the perishable goods onboard may spoil before reaching the destination.

At the global level, these kinds of supply chain disruptions are a big contributor to food waste. Cooper cited research from the International Institute of Refrigeration that found 475 million tons of lost food may be saved annually with proper refrigeration.

AWS and Carrier believe Lynx could help. The platform will gather data from Carrier-made refrigeration units, as well as other sources such as weather reports, to let supply chain operators track the location of their cargo, temperature conditions and external events that could disrupt delivery. Under the hood, Lynx will store data in the Amazon S3 object storage service while using the cloud giant’s AWS IoT suite to process the information.

The idea is that enterprises could leverage Lynx to “reduce spoilage by improving the reliability and predictability of food transport and related handoffs across the cold chain,” Cooper elaborated. Lynx can also detect refrigerator problems before they lead to breakdowns that may cause food to spoil.

Moreover, the data from the platform could make it possible to plan “more efficient routes, enabling transportation companies to take high-quality food farther, potentially to regions that lack access,” Cooper wrote.

Photo: Carrier