Danfoss to help retailer cut energy and waste

DENMARK: Danfoss has announced a collaboration with the Salling Group, Denmark’s largest retailer, and Microsoft in an effort to reduce food loss and energy usage in retail refrigeration.

The initiative is part of the Salling Group’s pledged investment of over DKK2.4bn (€323m) to create a carbon neutral business. The collaboration with Danfoss and Microsoft intends to develop digital services to track temperature and energy use of supermarket refrigeration, enabling preventative maintenance to avoid food losses and energy waste.

The companies will work together to utilise energy efficient refrigeration systems, using Danfoss’ Alsense IoT platform to track refrigeration performance.

The collaboration will also see Salling Group pilot a new feature of Danfoss’ Alsense, called Mean Kinetic Temperature, which is said to expand the sensitivity of alarms. If a freezer door is accidentally left open or if a refrigerator temperature is incorrect, store managers will receive an alert when refrigeration reaches a “danger zone” before food has spoiled. These new warnings will give store managers an even earlier indication of a problem, so that corrective action can be taken before food is lost. 

Salling is the owner of the Netto chain, operating in Denmark, Germany, Poland and Sweden, as well as the Danish Føtex, Bilka and Salling stores. It was one of first adopters of CO2 refrigerants and has been collaborating with Danfoss since the 1980s to implement sustainable cooling technology in stores. Additionally, Danfoss has also been partnering with Microsoft since 2019 to combine its domain expertise with the Microsoft Cloud platform.

“A key challenge for many organisations today, is the ability to gather the right data and act on it accordingly – additionally to record and report on their emissions, which our platform enables,” said Peter Skov, enterprise commercial director at Microsoft Denmark.

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