Cold stock doesn't spoil during the day. It spoils at 2am, during load shedding, with nobody watching.

A cold room that fails overnight costs you the stock, the insurance argument and — if an inspector asks for records — the compliance story too. addanode monitors cold rooms, freezers, display fridges and reefer moves continuously: calibrated temperature (and door, power and humidity where it matters), alerts to your phone while there's still time to act, and automatic records that stand in for the paper logs R638 hygiene inspections and HACCP plans expect — kept safe through the very power failures that cause the losses.

What we monitor

The whole cold chain, on one dashboard.

Cold rooms & freezers

Calibrated air (and product-simulant) temperature per room, door-open events, compressor power draw — so you see the failure developing, not just the thaw.

Retail & kitchen fridges

Display cases, under-counter units and back-of-house fridges across sites — the units whose paper logs are guessed at closing time, automated instead.

Vehicles & reefer moves

Trip temperature histories for delivery vehicles and reefer containers, so the cold chain claim survives the hand-over — and disputes land on data.

The compliance layer

R638, HACCP and the records inspectors actually ask for.

South African food businesses operate under the R638 hygiene regulations (the regime behind the municipal Certificate of Acceptability), which expects perishables kept at safe temperatures — with records to show it. HACCP-based food safety programmes go further: cold storage is a classic critical control point, and a CCP without monitoring records is a finding waiting to be written. Continuous monitoring converts both from a clipboard ritual into an export:

  • Automatic temperature logs per unit, timestamped, tamper-evident — the daily record kept even on weekends and public holidays, which is precisely when paper logging stops;
  • Excursion records with responses — what went out of range, when, for how long, who was alerted and what was done: the corrective-action trail HACCP audits want;
  • Calibration discipline — sensor checks in service, because a log from an uncalibrated probe is a liability wearing a lab coat;
  • Insurance-grade incident evidence — when a compressor dies, the record shows the failure, the alert and the response times. Claims settle on that.

Monitoring supports compliance — it doesn't replace your food-safety programme. Your COA, your HACCP plan and your hygiene practice remain yours; what changes is that the temperature-records requirement runs itself, and problems surface while stock is still saveable.

The South African design spec

Built for load shedding, because that's where cold chains die.

  • The monitoring outlives the outage. Sensors and gateways run on batteries and buffer locally — the record through a four-hour outage is complete, including the recovery curve that tells you whether stock stayed safe.
  • Thermal-mass intelligence, not panic alerts. A packed freezer rides out hours of outage; an empty display fridge doesn't. Alert thresholds work on product-relevant temperature and time-out-of-range, so 2am alerts mean act now, not "power blipped".
  • Generator changeover watched. Where sites have backup power, the same system logs whether the changeover happened and the cold plant restarted — the join between this page and compressor condition monitoring, since fridge plant that cycles through outages fails younger.
  • Multi-site by default. Butcheries to DC networks: every site's every unit in one view, with per-site alert routing — the pattern in our cold-chain case study.
Frequently asked

Cold chain monitoring questions.

For how a real deployment rode through load shedding, read the case study.

The hygiene regulations expect perishable food kept at safe temperatures with the operator able to demonstrate control — in practice, inspectors ask to see temperature logs for cold rooms and fridges. Continuous monitoring produces those records automatically, with no gaps on the days nobody remembered the clipboard. Confirm specifics with your municipal Environmental Health office; the record-keeping itself is the part we automate.
It provides what a HACCP plan's cold-storage CCP needs: continuous measurement against your critical limits, excursion alerts, and corrective-action records tied to each event. Your HACCP plan defines the limits and responses; the system enforces the measuring and remembers everything — which is the half audits fail people on.
Minutes — and usually before the temperature is even out of range, because compressor power draw and a climbing trend flag trouble first. Alerts go to WhatsApp/SMS with escalation, so the 2am failure becomes a 2:10am phone buzz instead of an 8am write-off.
Per unit it's a calibrated sensor set and a share of a site gateway, run as a monthly subscription covering hardware, connectivity, platform and alerts — quoted as a written band after a free remote review of your unit list. One saved cold room of stock typically funds years of it.
Yes — battery-powered sensors need no wiring into the landlord's plant, so your stock's conditions are recorded independently wherever it sits, including in transit. Independent records are exactly what you want when the storage isn't yours.

Know your cold chain is holding — especially when the power isn't.

Send us your unit list — rooms, fridges, vehicles, sites. We'll propose monitoring that alerts in time and keeps the records your inspections expect.