A major national bakery was facing an invisible but costly operational challenge. Each year, millions of reusable plastic bread trays circulated through its distribution network—moving from industrial bakeries to retail customers across the country. These trays were intended to be reused multiple times, forming the backbone of an efficient, closed-loop supply chain.
But despite its scale and sophistication, the system had a serious leak. An estimated ten percent of trays were lost, stolen, or damaged every year, resulting in millions of dollars in annual replacement costs. The company lacked the visibility to understand where and how the losses were occurring.
This issue is not unique. Across the commercial baking industry, reusable plastic tray loss is a persistent problem. The American Bakers Association (ABA) reports that more than $10 million is spent annually on tray replacement. In response, the ABA launched TrayTheft.org—an awareness and training campaign designed to help bakeries, retailers, and foodservice providers address theft and loss through better education and policy engagement.
“Reusable plastic trays are integral to the distribution of baked goods. Therefore, we need to continue to communicate to our employees, customers, lawmakers, and the public that tray theft is an issue of importance.”
— Lauren Williams, Director of Government Relations, American Bakers Association
Members of VectorLink’s team were brought in to design a solution that could uncover the source of shrinkage, reduce replacement spend, and deliver operational insights—without introducing new burdens on drivers, customers, or existing infrastructure. While the project was ultimately not implemented due to shifting business priorities, the resulting system design now serves as a reference architecture for scalable, low-cost asset tracking across multiple industries.
The bakery’s nationwide distribution network involved a mix of company-owned and third-party logistics models. In some regions, the bakery operated its own trucks and drivers. In others, third-party drivers operated bakery-owned vehicles. In many markets, fully outsourced carriers handled deliveries.
This fragmentation posed a major constraint. The bakery could not rely on vehicle-based tracking hardware, since many vehicles were not under their control. Installing fixed readers at customer locations was also not feasible. Further complicating the situation, the majority of the drivers were employees of the distribuitors limiting any operational changes, such as manual tray scanning.
The company had previously explored RFID and cellular tracking solutions, but both options proved too expensive to scale. The cost of tracking hardware often exceeded the value of a tray, making full deployment economically unviable.
The solution had to work everywhere—without relying on owned vehicles, customer-site infrastructure, or user behavior.
The proposed system centered around Wiliot’s battery-free Bluetooth tags. These small, low-cost devices are powered entirely by ambient radio frequency energy. With a per-unit cost of under fifty cents, they met the critical requirement of staying well below the tray’s replacement cost.
To avoid modifying vehicles or handheld scanners, the team designed a novel approach using smart hand trucks. These delivery carts—already used by drivers at customer drop-offs—were retrofitted with lightweight sensor kits. Each kit included a Wiliot bridge to energize nearby tags, GPS and Wi-Fi positioning modules, an edge processor, a cellular modem, and a battery pack.
When a driver used the hand truck during a delivery, the system would automatically scan any tagged trays nearby. The location and timestamp of each scan was uploaded in real time to a centralized analytics platform. No manual intervention was required from the driver.
This method enabled a concept known as last-known-location tracking. If a tray was last scanned at a customer location, the system could infer that the tray remained at that site—eliminating the need for continuous tracking. By relying on opportunistic reads rather than persistent telemetry, the system delivered high-confidence visibility at a fraction of the cost of active tracking.
All collected data was streamed into a custom analytics dashboard, built to integrate seamlessly with the bakery’s enterprise resource planning systems. The interface provided visibility into tray movements, loss trends, and utilization patterns—without requiring any changes to field operations.
Operations and logistics teams could generate reports showing how many trays were currently deployed at each customer location, which driver or route delivered them, and how long trays had been in the field. The system also enabled metrics like average tray lifespan, utilization rate by region, and overdue counts by route or customer.
This data made it possible to identify specific routes or customer sites with unusually high loss rates, helping the company isolate root causes and drive targeted interventions.
Importantly, the system’s output also complements ABA’s TrayTheft.org initiative. With educational materials, signage, and customer letters already in circulation, the addition of granular tray location data provides the operational leverage needed to make policy efforts more effective and enforceable.
The proposed rollout plan was designed to minimize risk and demonstrate early value. The first phase focused on a single distribution center, tracking five hundred trays across a single route over the course of one month. Subsequent phases would expand to cover all routes from the same distribution center, then all company-owned last-mile operations, and eventually the entire nationwide fleet.
Because the tracking cost per tray remained significantly lower than the cost of replacement, the system could scale to millions of trays without compromising the business case. A reduction in shrinkage of just 30% would deliver more than two and a half million dollars in annual savings. Additional operational efficiencies—such as improved balancing of tray inventory across regions—promised further upside.
Although this project was never deployed, the design has broad relevance across industries that rely on returnable packaging or mobile assets. Similar approaches are applicable to beverage crate distribution, e-commerce logistics, and wholesale delivery networks.
In fact, members of the same team later adapted elements of this system for use with a global electrical distributor managing reusable totes across nearly two thousand locations. The same principles—low-cost passive tracking, opportunistic scanning, and last-known-location logic—continue to inform VectorLink’s work across sectors.
This project exemplifies the power of designing for constraint. Faced with a distributed logistics network, limited infrastructure control, and strict cost requirements, the team developed a solution that leveraged ambient power, intelligent inference, and transparent integration to solve a multi-million dollar problem.
Rather than chasing perfect real-time visibility, the system focused on delivering just enough data, at just the right time, to enable better decision-making. In doing so, it showed how scalable asset tracking can be achieved without batteries, without fixed readers, and without asking the user to do anything differently.
In the context of industry-wide efforts like TrayTheft.org, this approach offers something new: operational intelligence at scale—allowing bakeries not only to raise awareness, but to take meaningful action based on real data.
