RFID and cold-chain tracking in Nairobi

Jomo Kenyatta International Airport is the main gateway for Kenya’s cut flowers and much of its fresh vegetables and fruit, most of it bound for Europe, with the Netherlands as a leading market. Produce arrives from the farms already cooled, waits in pre-cooling rooms and cold stores in the airport’s freight area, is built up on pallets and loaded on the evening flights. An hour in a warm corridor, or a strike or delay that leaves boxes waiting, shows up later as lost vase life.

On the map, each cold room, build-up area and dock shows its latest temperature, and consignments sit in the room that holds them. An alert rule — out of range for 10 minutes, say — is checked every 15 seconds and appears in the app with Show on map; the History player replays the night for the claim or the audit. See the cold-chain solution and the Polar Pharma demo.

Since 2018, containers landed at Mombasa have been railed to Nairobi on the Standard Gauge Railway to the Inland Container Depot at Embakasi, run by the Kenya Ports Authority, where importers clear and collect them. That has pulled container freight stations, bonded warehouses and transport yards into the surrounding area.

For the warehouse that receives those boxes, Spatial Map maps the dock doors, yard slots and the gate, shows trailers and containers in their slots, and follows RFID pallets from stripping to storage to the outbound lane, as in the Eastport Cross-Dock demo. Depot and customs systems stay where they are.

Much of Nairobi’s newer warehousing has gone up along Mombasa Road and on towards Mlolongo and Athi River, close to the airport, the depot and the route to the port, while the older Industrial Area remains dense and busy. The Nairobi Expressway, an elevated toll road of about 27 km that opened in 2022, runs from Mlolongo past JKIA to James Gichuru Road in the west, shortening trips between the warehouses, the airport and the city.

In those distribution centres, rack locations are coloured from your WMS stock by bin, RFID cartons are read at the dock doors and forklifts show as live markers, as in the Crestline Fulfillment demo with 2,204 rack locations.

Many Nairobi DCs supply not only Kenya but distributors in Uganda, Rwanda and Tanzania. Group the DC with your other sites into a solution per country or per customer, and give each distributor a read-only link to its own staging lane or bay, with an expiry date. Reports — stock on hand, dock turns, cold-room excursions — export to PDF, Excel, CSV or JSON, or go out as a public read-only report link.

Tagging pallets and cold rooms identifies no one. Tagging pickers or drivers does, and then Kenya’s Data Protection Act 2019 is the context — be clear about the purpose, tell staff and collect only what you need; your legal advisers decide what applies. Ask AI (beta) masks personal values before the model sees them. Our DPA describes how Spatial Map processes your data.