Dubai, UAE, 27 January 2019: The food management system requires a maintenance plan, said Mahmoud Dergam Qadri, District Maintenance Manager, UAE Head Office, Majid Al Futtaim, during an interview on the sidelines of the Ninth Middle East Cold Chain Food Safety Conference. “Maintenance is required in terms of an asset’s lifecycle, in general, for refrigeration systems,” he said. The kind of conditioning monitoring, he added, plays a major role in food safety, when it comes to temperature follow-ups and data logging of such temperatures.

From a technical perspective, Qadri said: “As Carrefour, Majid Al Futtaim Retail, we sell off-the-shelf. We also constantly log our cold storage temperatures and are able to analyse them on the spot. As of today, local service providers keep up with the system, based on call-outs and whenever we see any breakdown or fluctuation in temperature.” He added, “The same is reported to the management and has to be followed-up with a corrective action plan, after which the supplier and the service provider has to attend to it and do the necessary rectification.”

Elaborating on the role of technology, Qadri said: “IoT too plays a major role in monitoring temperature on a real-time basis. Nowadays, we have an in-house monitoring system, which is not directly linked, so the store has to monitor the temperatures on its own. In the near future, we are trying to look for better development in the IoT segment.” Speaking on energy efficiency in hypermarkets and Carrefour’s contribution to the field, he said: “The focus is not only on energy efficiency, but also on sustainability. We are exploring old assets that we have in terms of GWP and carrying out retrofits.”