Lindt & Sprüngli: Preserving Excellence with Smart Monitoring

Crafting fine chocolate is an art — and ensuring it retains its full flavour and freshness demands precision. That’s why Lindt & Sprüngli Spa, a global leader in premium chocolate, has embraced technological innovation.

To enhance the monitoring of its refrigerated storage facilities, the company decided to embrace a new connected mobility platform, now equipped with a new set of exclusive, advanced features.

The Company

Lindt & Sprüngli is internationally recognised as a market leader in premium chocolate, with a wide product range distributed across more than 120 countries. Over its 175-year history, the company has evolved into one of the most innovative and creative players in the chocolate industry.

Founded in 1845, when a father and son duo began producing solid chocolate in their small Sprüngli & Son patisserie, the company has navigated multiple industrial and commercial eras. Yet, the entrepreneurial spirit and passion for chocolate-making remain — values shared by the Sprüngli family and Rodolphe Lindt, who invented the first true melting dark chocolate and later sold his business to Sprüngli.

Today, Lindt & Sprüngli products are manufactured across 12 production sites in Europe and the United States. The company operates 25 subsidiaries and affiliates, more than 410 owned shops, and partners with over 100 independent distributors globally.

The Challenge

Lindt & Sprüngli distributes its chocolate via a network of third-party Transit Points — decentralised food distribution centres not owned by the company itself. Stocked via shipments from production sites, these locations are critical to the national cold chain. Given that the storage duration varies, maintaining consistent product quality requires precise, real-time oversight of environmental conditions, particularly temperature.

The Uniquon Solution: Smart Monitoring for Cold Chain Excellence

The Platform enables the smart monitoring of storage temperatures in all the Transit Points across the country. This is achieved through a web platform with dedicated dashboards, mobile apps, and GPRS data transmission units installed at each site.

Temperature data is recorded every minute, synchronised with universal time, and processed through dedicated algorithms. The system not only triggers alerts when thresholds are breached but also archives the data for historical analysis — enabling advanced auto-correlation to assess the quality of handling at each site.

Results

The new system offers full real-time visibility of cold chain performance. In addition to continuous monitoring, it instantly detects anomalies or malfunctions and sends automatic alerts to both the web interface and mobile apps used by Lindt & Sprüngli's Transit Point managers and service teams.

The platform, designed and delivered by Uniquon represents a significant advancement in IoT applications.Built initially to monitor temperature, its architecture now supports more complex environmental data management across the national network. The resulting aggregation of Big Data enables temporal and spatial correlations, turning simple remote monitoring into a powerful tool for operational insight and preventative action.