Imagine you are Guy Fieri. (Stay with me.)
It’s late 2024 and the president of your company calls to tell you 24,000 bottles of your tequila they have disappeared. You would probably have a number of questions, but the main one is likely: How did this happen?
The answer is that global cargo theft is becoming increasingly sophisticated as the shipping and logistics industries struggle to keep up. Unfortunately for the industry, much of the world’s cargo essentially goes dark between checkpoints at ports or distribution centers.
On Wednesday, fleet management company Samsara is announcing its own solution to that problem in the form of a business card-sized tracking sticker. Simply called the Samsara Tracking Label, it looks like any number of shipping labels that can be affixed to cargo large and small. But that tag hides a small zinc battery and Bluetooth low-power technology that can be picked up by millions of other Samsara devices, offering real-time location in a disposable package.
He is not the first tracer of Samsara. The company has been helping customers track “assets” for years and in different ways, David Gal, vice president of connected equipment at Samsara, told TechCrunch in an exclusive interview. But those solutions can be bulky and expensive, he said.
“The customers basically said, ‘We need something that’s real-time, and we need something that can be small enough to fit on any piece of equipment,'” Gal said. This led Samsara to develop a product the size of a wine cork called the “Asset Tag”.
The asset tag solved real-time visibility for some customers, but the tag itself still protruded beyond what was placed and wasn’t cheap enough to place on anything but valuable cargo. It’s also something customers wanted back at the end of a shipment, meaning it wasn’t as useful for one-way shipping.
This feedback prompted Gal’s team to iterate further, resulting in the Tracking Label.
The real differentiator from other monitoring solutions, Gal said, is Samsara’s existing network of devices. The company has spent the last few years equipping customer fleets with cameras and other sensors to protect and optimize their operations. The tracking tag leverages this existing infrastructure as a Bluetooth network in order to provide customers with an accurate location at all times.
Samsara has already found other ways to use this network to create new lines of business. In May, it announced a suite of tools called “Ground Intelligence” that uses artificial intelligence to spot hazards like potholes in real time.
But that work involves working with cities and local governments. Tracking Label could be a much bigger business as the shipping and logistics industries are seemingly constantly in chaos. Companies want certainty about shipments, whether they’re trying to get a product to someone on time or waiting for a critical item.
Customers will receive the Samsara tracking tags in a kind of sleep state, which Gal said can last up to nine months. Once a customer activates a tag, this zinc battery will power the Bluetooth radio for approximately 45 days. Once the label is no longer needed, Samsara designed it to be disposable. (A lithium battery, Gal said, would complicate that goal.)
Gal said he expects Samsara’s label to remain in the “mission-critical” world, meaning it will mostly help big companies — maybe even Guy Fieri. And it’s not just cargo theft, he said. Real-time tracking allows companies to make faster decisions if a shipment is delayed or rerouted.
“It shifts the paradigm from reactive to proactive. If you know something is late, you can catch it,” he said.
Samsara is not alone in trying to create better visibility in shipping. UPS just announced a plan in April to use RFID sensors to track packages in real time.
But as Gal points out, RFID only helps if a shipment stays near an RFID scanner. If a package falls off a truck — literally or figuratively — he believes Samsara’s tracking tag will be much more effective thanks to the company’s ever-moving network of sensors.
And while it’s not the only consideration, Gal isn’t shy about the impact he believes Tracking Label can have on cargo theft.
“I have a feeling we’re going to take down some crime rings with this,” he said.
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