Imagine you’re Guy Fieri. (Stay with me.)
It’s late 2024 and the president of your company calls to tell you that 24,000 bottles of your tequila have vanished. You’d presumably have a number of questions, but chief among them is likely: how did this happen?
The answer is that global cargo theft is becoming increasingly sophisticated, all while the shipping and logistics industries are struggling 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 this problem in the form of a business-card sized sticky tracking label. Simply called the Samsara Tracking Label, it resembles any number of shipping labels that might be affixed to cargo big and small. But that label is hiding a small zinc battery and Bluetooth low energy tech that can be picked up by Samsara’s millions of other devices, offering real-time location in a disposable package.
It’s not Samsara’s first tracker. The company has been helping customers track “assets” for years now, and in different ways, David Gal, Samsara’s vice president of connected equipment, told TechCrunch in an exclusive interview. But those solutions could be bulky and expensive, he said.
“Customers basically said: ‘We need something that’s real time, and we need something that can be small enough to mount on any piece of equipment,” Gal said. That led to Samsara developing a wine cork-sized product called the “Asset Tag.”
The Asset Tag solved real-time visibility for some customers, but the tag itself still protruded from whatever it was fixed to, and was not cheap enough to be put on anything but precious 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 pushed Gal’s team to iterate further, resulting in the Tracking Label.
The real differentiator to other tracking 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 guard and optimize their operations. The Tracking Label leverages that existing infrastructure as a Bluetooth network in order to provide customers with a precise location at any time.
Samsara has already found other ways to use that network to generate new lines of business. In May, it announced a suite of tools called “Ground Intelligence” that uses AI to spot hazards like potholes in real-time.
But that project involves working with cities and local governments. The 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 are trying to get a product to someone on time or waiting for a crucial component.
Customers will receive the Samsara Tracking Labels in a sort of sleep mode, which Gal said could last for as long as 9 months. Once a customer activates a label, that zinc battery will power the Bluetooth radio for around 45 days. Once the label is no longer needed, Samsara designed it to be disposable. (A lithium battery, Gal said, would have complicated this goal.)
Gal said he expects Samsara’s label to stay in the the world of “critical shipments,” meaning this will mostly help large companies — perhaps even Guy Fieri’s. And it’s not just about cargo theft, he said. Real-time tracking allows companies to make quicker decisions if a shipment is delayed, or re-routed.
“It shifts the paradigm from reactive to proactive. If you know something’s delayed, you can get ahead of it,” he said.
Samsara isn’t the only one 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 close to an RFID scanner. If a package falls off a truck — literally or figuratively — he thinks Samsara’s Tracking Label will be far more effective thanks to the company’s constantly-moving network of sensors.
And while it’s not the only consideration, Gal was not shy about the impact he thinks the Tracking Label can have on cargo theft.
“I have a feeling that we’ll bust some crime rings with this,” he said.
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