Eliminating Manual Weight Entry in High-Volume Foodservice Warehouses

Estimated 5 min reading time

In modern foodservice warehouses, TIME is everything.

Imagine your pickers on a busy evening: instead of manually entering weights, they could just drop produce on a scale, hit a button in the picking app, and the weight is instantly captured.

➡️ That means: faster picks, fewer mistakes, and clearer invoices - especially when you’re weighing hundreds of kilos a night.

That was the challenge for us at ORBN proposed by our friends at Crowbond Foodservice. They wanted to connect their GRAM Xtrem networked scales directly into our cloud-based picking app.

The Problem: Local Network Devices

Many services offer an API (a way for one system to get data from another system without a front facing app) to integrate with, and that is what we hoped for here: an easy web API.

On this occasion, it wasn’t that simple.

Instead, the scales only speak UDP (User Datagram Protocol) - a fast, connectionless protocol common in IoT devices (like wifi-enabled toasters for example).

It complicated things because:

• The scales only live on the local network, and are not exposed to the internet.
• Packets can be dropped, duplicated, or arrive out of order.
• Data comes in vendor-specific framing - in other words, a custom binary payload that only makes sense if you know the vendor’s rules.

But, we found a solution…

The Solution: a secure edge-to-cloud bridge to our integration platform

We’ve already built an integration hub (a platform based onApache Camelif you’re interested 😉 ) that allows us to integrate quickly and seamlessly into almost any possible endpoint / service. So it made sense to build something that could push the scale UDP data into there too.

The Process

We built an “edge-to-cloud” bridge:

• Warehouse Network:

We built a small local service that listens for UDP packets from the scales, tracks their status (online / offline), and parses payloads into JSON (JavaScript Object Notation).

This service publishes securely over TLS (Transport Layer Security - the same encryption banks use) to the ORBN integration hub.

• In the cloud (ORBN Integration Hub):

The integration hub publishes data to Ably, a managed real-time messaging platform, distributes events with built-in resilience and elastic scale.

Each scale gets its own channel, allowing multiple users to connect to a scale at the same time (meaning faster picking, and no worries on the order the weights take place!)

• On the handheld device:

On the picker app, Pickers see available scales, the live weights, and only record “stable” readings.

If no scale is online, they can still enter weights manually- no workflow interruption.

What does that all mean?

This design does so much more than just “making the scales work”.

It’s:

🔒 Security by design:Scales stay LAN-only; the bridge makes outbound TLS (TLS is the same encryption your bank uses) connections only.

WIN: This keeps your local network locked down and secure.

📈 Scalability baked in:The same approach works for 3 or 300 scales without burdening the LAN. The picking app sees minimal latency - put produce on the scale and see the weight in the app inreal time.

WIN: This solution is built to grow with your business.

💪 Resilience for operations:Packet loss doesn’t derail the application; only stable, validated weights are saved.

WIN: This ensures your picking process is always reliable and accurate.

🔮 Future-proofing:The model extends to other UDP devices like sensors, meters, or scanners.

WIN: This means the solution can be expanded to automate other warehouse tasks later down the line.

Long-term business impact

• Operational efficiency
  Faster, more reliable weighing means less picker downtime.
• Customer confidence
  Customers trust precise weights on invoices, no more disputes over 'rounded' quantities.
• Reduced IT risk
  AN stays locked down; no devices are exposed directly.
• Innovation headroom
  Once weight data flows securely into the cloud, it can drive analytics, automation, and AI.

What’s Next?

This is part of a on-going project to help Crowbond Foodservice transform their operation.

🧐 If that's the sort of automation your foodservice warehouse could benefit from - we’re the ones you need to talk to.

ORBN designs and delivers the connected systems that power the UK’s most ambitious foodservice and wholesale operations.That could be you too!

From order, to ERP, to warehouse, to customer, we make your business run as one - fast, accurate, and built for growth.

👉 Want to open a dialogue - book a meeting using this link:
orbn.digital/book-meeting

Talk soon!

Tech stack

Node 22 (edge service), Ably Realtime (pub/sub), PostgreSQL with TimescaleDB (telemetry), React Native (picker app), Honeycomb (observability).