ColdChain WatchCold-chain energy benchmark for small restaurants.
An affordable energy monitor for small restaurants — helping them spot avoidable waste. Driven by a tiny team.
Why this exists
The question
Small restaurants pay an outsized share of their margin to keep cold-chain equipment running. Most of them have no visibility into where that energy actually goes — they just see a single power bill at the end of the month and shrug.
ColdChain Watch is a small box and a smaller app that gives the shop owner two numbers: which equipment is using how much, and which hour of the day is wasteful. That's it. That's the entire product.
What the pilot showed
47 small restaurants in two cities, six months of data. The headlines:
- 18% average reduction in cold-chain electricity once the owner could see the breakdown.
- The biggest savings came from one habit: turning off the standby walk-in freezer overnight in places where evening foot traffic dropped to zero.
- The dashboard nobody opened was the failure case. When we shipped a daily WeChat summary instead, daily-active engagement went from 12% to 71%.
How it actually works
The device is a clamp-on current meter and a tiny LTE modem. Owner installs it themselves in under 10 minutes — no electrician needed. Data syncs every 15 minutes; nothing personal ever leaves the shop, just numbers.
Hardware BOM: under $40. We sell at cost; the project is run by Novawerk volunteers and one part-time hardware engineer.
Get involved
We're looking for: shop owners willing to host a unit, hardware folks who can help with the next revision, anyone in Cantonese-speaking neighborhoods who can run a one-day install workshop.
How it's going
- Q4 2024ColdChain Watch idea pitched at a Novawerk open day. First collaborators commit a Saturday afternoon.
- Q1 2025Validation conversations with target users. Scope cut on purpose; the smaller version turns out to be the one people actually want.
- Q2 2025First measurable result: Cold-chain energy benchmark for small restaurants.. The team writes the playbook so others can replicate.
- Q4 2025Working with a partner organization to extend reach without losing the qualitative care that made it work.
“We didn't want a product launch. We wanted something that would still be here in three years — without us.”
Team & roles
Coordinates direction, runs weekly retros, talks to partners.
Owns the artifact — code, hardware, or the printed thing — depending on the week.
Shows up in person where the work meets the world.
Documentation, retros, community check-ins. Looking for someone.
Get involved
If anything in here resonates — even just one paragraph — that's enough to start a conversation. Lightweight contribution is welcome. So is sitting in on a retro before you decide.
