The ease of Reporter: Sumaq's a fan!
Once upon a time, there was a young company in Ghent. Born after two friends joined forces with a mission to bring a cutting-edge product to market. Meet Peter and Franklin, founders of Sumaq NV and their brand Qinti, as well as fans of Reporter's ease.
Peruvian sun god with a Belgian twist
The year is 2018, Chef Peter and globetrotter Franklin decide to team up to bring a healthy vegetarian alternative to the Belgian market. Inspired by his adventures in Peru, Franklin immediately thought of quinoa. And so it happened. Qinti (named after the Peruvian sun god Inti) was born and brought us delicious vegetarian burgers based on quinoa!
Reporter: winning hearts with the power of simplicity
In order to meet the strict food inspection requirements as a food producer, it was time for an upgrade. Thus, Sumaq decided to show complicated and outdated technology the door. New, easy temperature recording was welcomed with open arms. Franklin and Peter tell us more about how that went down.
No time for outdated technology
"How was temperature logging at Sumaq before Reporter was installed?"
"Difficult. We were working with a system that had separate loggers hanging in the cold stores and freezers. These loggers had to be detached form the wall, and then connected to the PC to extract their readings. In order to do this, we had to install custom software and only then could we view the measurement data.
In practice, this meant that we could only view our measurement data weeks later. Meaning that if the temperature had been too high, we could only see this afterwards. Because of the cumbersome nature of the system, extracting the data was sometimes forgotten.
A system that also independently transmits the measurements from the automatic temperature registration to a cloud environment was therefore needed. We were fed up with manually extracting data from our loggers. A refrigeration technician recommended Reporter to us, which answered our demands perfectly!"
"So you went from an 'after the fact' monitoring system to Reporter with real-time data and temperature alarms, what is that difference like?"
"The difference is huge. With Reporter, we can easily download temperature logs from the cloud. With no custom software, no hassle.
Actually, the temperature alarm saved us recently. On a Friday afternoon, the freezer door was left open. We discovered this when Reporter sent us an alarm notification by text message. A great stroke of luck, as it allowed us to save the contents of the freezer in time. Without an alarm system, we would have ended up having to discard the contents. In fact, Reporter has already paid itself off."
"You received an alarm message from Reporter, was this message clear and timely?"
"Definitely, we chose the cascading alarm option, which means multiple people receive an alarm notification. You can choose this when setting up the alarms. We received a text message clearly stating at which room there was a problem. This allowed us to take quick and targeted action.
By the way, we have also received an alarm notification once when there was a freezer power outage and the temperature got too high."
Dead easy installation
"Franklin, you installed Reporter by yourself, how did that go?"
"Surprisingly smooth. You have a sensor module with 5 connectors: 1-4 for sensors and the remaining for power. It's even written on there. You connect everything and the system starts working. Dead easy.
Because of my past experiences, I did not look forward to fine-tuning all the settings. 'I need to sit down and take my time to sort that out' I thought. As a result, Reporter was forgotten about for a while after the physical installation. Unnecessary it turns out, because fine-tuning the settings was as straight forward as the rest of the installation."
"You mentioned that you called your refrigeration technician to assist you in configuring Reporter?"
"Right! No need, it turned out. He referred me to the Crodeon Dashboard where I could easily adjust all settings such as measurement intervals, room names, and set alarm thresholds to trigger alarms. Everything was very self-explanatory and a very pleasant user experience overall.
What positively surprised me was that Reporter had already started measuring and recording since the physical installation. So I already had historical measurement data from our freezers and cold rooms. I thought 'awesome, you don't have to configure anything, or do anything, it just works'.
The fact that Reporter uses a cloud platform is fantastic. Custom software can only cause problems".
Framed in red: a temperature sensor in one of Sumaq's cold rooms.
"The temperature sensors are located in the cold rooms and the freezer room, but where did you install Reporter itself?"
"Reporter is located upstairs in our attic, between the sandwich panels of the cold rooms on one side and the sandwich panels of the roof on the other. I remember being worried about it as I was installing Reporter. But the GSM connection turns out to be strong enough to reliably send data anyway."
FAVV, IFS, certificates & the international market
"To professionalise the production process you sought advice from a quality consultant, he was also the one who recommended a temperature alarm, correct?"
"That's right, after our consultant heard about our complaints regarding our previous cold room monitoring system, he advised us to look for a remote monitoring and alarm system. Especially considering the international market, IFS, and obtaining the necessary certificates, an alarm system was crucial. Besides, FAVV* requires freezers larger than 10 m³ to have an alarm system installed.
We went looking for a system that fit our needs and eventually arrived at Reporter."
*An automatic temperature recording system is mandatory for means of transport of frozen food and storage rooms of frozen food exceeding 10 m3. - FAVV, p44
"Have you ever done a data export to show temperature logs to food inspection?"
"We have done a data export before, but not yet for food inspection. Our quality consultant told us that this is indeed a question that a food inspector might ask and that we should therefore try this function already. The export went smoothly and was clear. We did notice that we had very many measurement points. We then changed the measurement interval from every two minutes to every five minutes. That was more manageable."
Big fans
"What do you guys see as the biggest advantages of Reporter?"
"The Dashboard is cloudbased, installation is plug-and-play, the system is cost-efficient and reliable."
"Is there anything else you would like to tell us?"
"We are fans! It's really well done, congratulations!"
"Thanks, we love to hear that!"
Will you be the next Reporter supporter?
Are you also looking for a reliable remote monitoring system that is dead easy to install? Contact us or check out the products on our webshop.
Also check out the stories of these satisfied users of our temperature monitoring:
