Cofrico, a Galician company with more than 38 years of experience in the industrial and commercial refrigeration sector, has turned to Gradhoc all the experience, innovative spirit and knowledge generated through its commitment to R+D+i with the development of a cloud platform for the optimization of refrigeration. This spinoff is the result of years of work and effort by a multidisciplinary STEM team, made up of IT personnel, engineers, physicists, mathematicians, etc. Its purpose: to move towards food conservation at the lowest cost as a path to decarbonization. "Gradhoc was created with the intention of helping to decarbonize and optimize the resources available on the planet, with the ultimate goal of helping our customers optimize energy, maintenance and breakage costs in the food chain," explains Julio Fernández Teijeiro, manager of Gradhoc.

Gradhoc, participant in the V edition of Business Factory Food, seeks to respond to major challenges that occur in the field of industrial refrigeration, including: the loss of goods due to malfunctions of the refrigeration chambers, high energy consumption when the cooling system does not work optimally or production stops due to failures arising from a maintenance that is performed in most cases corrective and manual, without data or information.

Relying on technologies such as the internet of things, artificial intelligence, machine learning or the digital twin, Gradhoc is moving towards a 5.0 refrigeration, positioning itself in the market in a very competitive way, both at national and European level. "Our big advantage is that the Gradhoc tool overwrites and works autonomously based on the values calculated by the algorithms. We have transferred all the refrigeration knowledge to the tool and, in the vast majority of cases, we take advantage of the existing instrumentation in the installation. In some of them, without additional investment in hardware, we have reduced energy costs by up to 50%", emphasizes Fernández Teijeiro.

The software allows the optimization of the refrigeration installation and its maintenance, with 70% of self-executing actions. In this way, it offers numerous advantages for the food industry: it reduces the number of interventions, equipment downtime and maintenance costs; it guarantees greater food safety and quality; it fulfills functions related to preventive and predictive maintenance, thanks to artificial intelligence, which generates events that anticipate alarms and performs automatic actions before the failure occurs; and it improves the efficiency and energy savings of the industry, reducing costs and carbon footprint.

Its technology contributes to greater efficiency, sustainability and competitiveness in sectors such as retail (supermarkets, logistics centers...), fruit and vegetable, dairy, meat or even hotels, hospitals or pharma.

Gradhoc is currently implemented in 50 facilities throughout Spain and several pilot projects are being carried out in Chile, France, Hungary and Italy. Looking to the future, "our biggest challenge is to streamline the purchase cycle of our customers, since being an innovative product, doubts or skepticism always arise, although the results and data support us. We are carrying out pilot tests in several national and international supermarket chains, and in all of them the results have been very positive, so one of the biggest challenges will be to be able to absorb growth in a sustainable and organized way," he concludes.