The best ideas come from real problems. Ours started with a broken cooler and a warehouse full of wasted food.
Jake Simon and Tushar Agrawal met at Deloitte Consulting, where they worked in the IoT practice designing and deploying industrial IoT solutions for Fortune 100 manufacturers. They were connecting directly to factory machines - PLCs, production lines - to enable predictive and preventive maintenance. The work was impactful, but expensive and complex.
A close friend's father owned a produce warehouse and experienced a costly cooler malfunction. The problem wasn't the failing equipment - it was the lag in discovering the fault, which led to massive food waste and service disruptions. Jake and Tushar realized the same operational intelligence they were building for Fortune 100 factories could be brought to food service using simpler, off-the-shelf sensors.
As Jake puts it: "We are not a hardware company. The sensors aren't smart - they're just dumb sensors. It's what you actually do with the data that gives you the insight." They saw that the food service industry was drowning in manual processes - clipboards, paper logs, reactive firefighting - while the technology to automate all of it already existed.
They helped that first produce warehouse shift from reactive to proactive operations. That same year, ConnectedFresh won First Prize at the 2019 Momenta LoRaWAN Startup Challenge in Berlin - validating that this idea had legs far beyond a single warehouse.
Selected for the Techstars Future of Food Accelerator with Ecolab - one of just 12 companies chosen. This partnership deepened ConnectedFresh's ties to the food safety ecosystem and accelerated growth across major restaurant chains.
Trusted by leading restaurant chains and food service operators. An integration-first platform that plays nice with the tools operators already use. A team of ex-Deloitte, Siemens, SAP engineers who believe food safety shouldn't depend on someone remembering to check a clipboard.
We've spent our careers building enterprise IoT systems. Now we're making that technology accessible to everyone.
Our team includes engineers from Deloitte, Siemens, Hitachi, Hughes, SAP, and other leading technology companies, with years of experience designing large-scale IoT hardware and software projects. We started ConnectedFresh as a passion project after seeing how much food becomes waste or unsafe due to temperature-related issues.
