Wiliot talks scaling ambient IoT to cut food waste and emissions across supply chains

The food industry faces cross-cutting pressures such as geopolitical conflict, climate change, changing regulations, and foodborne illnesses. While these issues are pushing the boundaries of innovation, they also escalate supply chain disruptions and challenge global food safety, food security, and nutrition.

With technology driving changes in food production, food safety mechanisms are also evolving. However, while big data, AI, and Internet of Things (IoT) are being leveraged to identify risks more efficiently, research indicates that their implementation can be challenging.

Food Ingredients First sits down with Amir Khoshniyati, head of strategy and business development at Wiliot, to understand how the company addresses technical gaps in food safety compliance and waste prevention by leveraging ambient IoT solutions in the quick-service restaurants sector.

“At its core, the biggest challenge for F&B companies is ensuring operational consistency, guaranteeing products are handled, stored, and transported under the right conditions and visibility from farm to shelf,” says Khoshniyati.

“Wiliot’s ambient IoT Pixels and platform deliver continuous, automated, pallet, crate, case, and item-level visibility that enables brands to maintain this consistency across sourcing, manufacturing, storage, and distribution.”

Cutting food waste with “real-time” visibility

Reliable cold chains are essential for maintaining shelf life and food quality. Minor temperature variations, especially for perishable foods, can impact the end consumer’s food experience.

While traditional visibility tools like RFID or Radio Frequency Identification and QR codes are commonly used in cold chain monitoring, they have limitations, which Khoshniyati says ambient IoT addresses.

“Unlike QR codes, which rely on manual scanning, line of sight, and provide only snapshot data, ambient IoT Pixels transmit continuous, real-time environmental and location data automatically, without human intervention.”

“Compared to RFID, which depends on costly infrastructure and line-of-sight readers, battery-free, bluetooth-powered ambient IoT Pixels are easy to deploy, scalable, and, importantly, can work within existing wireless ecosystems, providing scalable outcomes.”

Reliable cold chains are essential for maintaining shelf life and food quality.This means that brands can continuously get real-time, item-level visibility on different parameters — temperature, humidity, location, and dwell time — rather than sporadically across the supply chain, Khoshniyati notes.

He explains how this plays out:

“During sourcing and manufacturing, our battery-free IoT Pixels provide visibility from the moment a product is tagged and serialized, capturing data on location, temperature, humidity and light detection, enabling early verification and compliance with proper treatment and quality control.”

The real-time visibility continues through the following stages.

“In storage, IoT Pixels provide ongoing monitoring of the asset’s location within the facility, time spent in various conditions, which include the item’s temperature and humidity at the individual item level, not just pallets or containers, providing real-time alerts that allow teams to act before spoilage or waste occurs.”

“Throughout distribution, Wiliot offers full cold chain visibility, helping retailers and brands verify product freshness at delivery and reduce recalls by spotting issues as they happen.”

This data can also help companies cultivate a proactive approach to reducing waste and minimizing their carbon footprint.

“This constant stream of data enables brands to detect issues instantly; if a product experiences unsafe temperatures during transit or storage, the system can immediately flag it so corrective action can prevent spoilage. The result is smarter, faster responses to cold chain breaches, stronger compliance, essential for consistent quality and safety.”

“This approach reduces waste and ensures quality from farm to shelf, supporting goals around waste reduction and carbon footprint minimization, while extending shelf life and minimizing recalls.”

Driving adoption

Despite its potential, widespread adoption of ambient IoT in the food sector still faces roadblocks. “In F&B, we’re seeing a few consistent hurdles that are slowing down real transformation, and they all tie back to visibility,” Khoshniyati notes.

“The first issue is fragmentation. From growers to distributors to quick-serve restaurants, each link in the chain uses different systems.”

“Gaining real-time data across the full journey of a product is nearly impossible with legacy tech like barcodes or even traditional RFID. We are changing that by embedding ambient IoT into the product itself, turning them into self-reporting, connected assets.”

Latency is another key concern. 

“In this industry, minutes matter. Shelf life, temperature control, and stockouts are all real-time challenges. But you’re too late if you rely on scanned data that’s hours or days old.”

The final challenge is trust. “Regulators, partners, and consumers all want proof. It’s not enough to say your food is sustainably sourced or safe; you must show it. Ambient IoT enables a living digital product passport that validates cold chain integrity, origin, and environmental impact at every step.”

Wiliot aims to offer a low-friction solution that works with existing infrastructure. “We’re not asking F&B players to rip and replace. We’re helping them innovate acceleratedly with technology that works in the background, scales easily, and brings a new level of intelligence to the supply chain,” Khoshniyati concludes.