For Deep Indian Kitchen (whose parent company is India’s Deep Foods), getting the temperature of the product down quickly — and keeping it there throughout the supply chain — is particularly necessary given the company’s hard work to create authenticity in its product recipes and the production of those items.
“It’s less about the technology of freezing per se, and more about the quality of ingredients and the types of foods being made with more complex processing prior to that freezing,” Laughlin says. “Our U.S. plants are more automated, and in our India plants, it's more manual labor, both of which really enable us to replicate the way Indian food is made at home or in a nice Indian restaurant.”
As the industry advances, Laughlin expects more emerging technology (such as artificial intelligence and machine learning) to make its way into operations overall, freezing and refrigeration included.
“There’s more room for AI, and I think as an industry, we’ve only just scratched the surface,” he says. “There’s going to be more from a production perspective, and at Deep, we are focused on building an increasingly AI-driven tech stack — and I know many other brands are as well.”
