This new tracking tag can help solve the problem of goods theft

Imagine you are Guy Fieri. (stay with me.)

It’s late 2024 and your company’s president calls you to tell you 24,000 bottles of your own tequila She disappeared. You should have a number of questions, but the most important one is likely to be: How did this happen?

The answer is that global cargo theft is becoming increasingly sophisticated, all while the shipping and logistics industries struggle to keep up. Unfortunately for the industry, much of the world’s goods essentially disappear between port checkpoints or distribution centers.

On Wednesday, fleet management company Samsara announced its own solution to this problem in the form of a business card-sized adhesive tracking sticker. Simply called the Samsara Tracking Label, it resembles any number of shipping labels that may be affixed to goods large and small. But that sticker hides a small zinc battery and Bluetooth Low Energy technology that can be picked up by millions of other Samsara devices, providing real-time location in a disposable package.

It’s not the first Samsara tracker. The company has been helping customers track “assets” for years, and in different ways, David Gall, Samsara’s vice president of connected equipment, told TechCrunch in an exclusive interview. But he said these solutions could be bulky and expensive.

“Customers basically said, ‘We need something that performs in real time, and we need something that can be small enough to mount on any piece of equipment.’” That led Samsara to develop a wine cork-sized product called an “asset tag,” Gal said.

The asset tag replaced real-time visibility for some customers, but the tag itself remained prominent from whatever it was installed on, and was not cheap enough to put on anything but valuable merchandise. It’s also something customers wanted at the end of the shipment, which meant it wasn’t useful for one-way shipping.

This feedback prompted Gal’s team to iterate further, resulting in a tracking rating.

The real difference between other tracking solutions is Samsara’s existing network of devices, Gal said. The company has spent the past few years equipping customers’ fleets with cameras and other sensors to protect and improve their operations. The tracking tag leverages existing infrastructure such as a Bluetooth network to provide customers with an accurate location at any time.

Samsara has already found other ways to use that network to create new lines of business. In May, that is Advertise a set of tools It’s called “Ground Intelligence” which uses artificial intelligence to detect hazards such as potholes in real time.

But this project involves working with cities and local governments. Tracking Label can be a much bigger business, as the shipping and logistics industries seem to constantly be in a state of disarray. Businesses want certainty about shipments, whether they’re trying to get a product to someone on time or waiting on a critical component.

Customers will have Samsara Tracking Labels in dormant mode, which Gall said could last up to nine months. Once the customer activates the sticker, this zinc battery will power the Bluetooth radio for approximately 45 days. Once the label is no longer needed, Samsara has designed it to be disposable. (A lithium battery would have complicated that goal, Gall said.)

Gall said he expects the Samsara brand to remain in the “critical cargo” realm, meaning this will mostly help larger companies — perhaps even Guy Fieri’s company. He said it was not just about stealing goods. 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 delayed, you can move forward with it,” he said.

Samsara isn’t the only one trying to create better visibility in the shipping industry; 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 the shipment stays close to the RFID scanner. If a package fell off a truck — literally or figuratively — he believes Samsara’s tracking label would be much more effective thanks to the company’s constantly moving network of sensors.

Although that’s not the only consideration, Gall wasn’t shy about the impact he believes a tracking label could have on merchandise theft.

“I have a feeling we’re going to catch some crime syndicates with this,” he said.