Service Foods
Products: RUCKUS Wi-Fi 6 Access Points (including IP67-rated hardened APs), RUCKUS One cloud platform, RUCKUS ICX Switching, RUCKUS Virtual SmartZone
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Where freshness meets reliability: How Service Foods built resilient cold-chain Wi-Fi
Every night, while most of New Zealand sleeps, Service Foods is moving. Orders are picked late into the evening. Trucks roll out before sunrise. Fresh, chilled, and frozen ingredients begin their journey to restaurants, hotels, aged-care facilities, and hospitals across the country — places where timing and consistency are non-negotiable.
With more than 800 staff, 220 trucks, and 15 branches nationwide, Service Foods is one of New Zealand’s largest privately owned foodservice distributors.
“We don’t just deliver food,” says Head of IT Deep Purohit. “We deliver innovation, sustainability, and differentiation. We’re known as the company behind every great chef.”
Behind that promise lies a demanding operational environment. Inside multi-temperature distribution centres — spanning ambient storage, chilled zones, and freezers operating at –25°C — wireless connectivity underpins every scan, pick, and dispatch. As the business expanded nationally, Service Foods needed a networking foundation that could scale with growth while performing reliably in extreme conditions.
The Challenge: Reliable Wi-Fi in Extreme Cold-Chain Environments
Cold-chain warehouses are among the most difficult environments for enterprise Wi-Fi. Dense steel racking disrupts RF performance. High ceilings increase signal distance. Moisture and condensation accelerate wear. And freezers operating at –25°C push hardware to its limits.
“The freezer is the biggest challenge,” Purohit explains. “The access points have to stay up and stay reliable.”
Prior to upgrading, intermittent dropouts created friction in high-velocity warehouse operations. With just three IT staff supporting multiple branches, troubleshooting across sites was time-consuming. As Service Foods continued acquiring new facilities, the complexity increased.
The business needed more than stronger signal strength, it needed a resilient, repeatable deployment model purpose-built for industrial cold-chain environments.
The Solution: A Purpose-Built, Design-Led Network Strategy
Having previously deployed RUCKUS in complex healthcare environments, Purohit was confident in its ability to handle challenging RF conditions.
“We compared multiple vendors,” he says. “But for warehousing — especially freezers, moisture, and dense racks — we needed a complete solution.”
Service Foods standardized on a full RUCKUS networking stack purpose-built for industrial environments:
- Hardened IP67-rated access points for freezer and wet zones
- BeamFlex-enabled Wi-Fi 6 APs for dense aisles and packing areas
- ICX switching for resilient branch networking
- Virtual SmartZone for centralised management
When an early migration stalled, RUCKUS engineers stepped in to redesign the deployment end-to-end, delivering RF heatmaps, placement plans, bills of materials, and rollout guidance tailored to each facility.
“They send us a floor plan, and we send back a complete design,” says RUCKUS Systems Engineer Adam Ng. “Within days, the gear is on the road.”
The result was a repeatable, plug-and-play model that enabled rapid deployment across new branches without requiring extensive on-site engineering.
The Results: Reliable Performance at National Scale
Today, Service Foods operates RUCKUS across all major branches, with expansion ongoing. The impact is both measurable and operational:
- Up to 40% greater wireless coverage using fewer access points
- Reliable Wi-Fi performance at –25°C in freezer environments
- 12 branches centrally managed with consistent visibility
Wi-Fi-related support calls have disappeared. Barcode scanning remains uninterrupted. IT resources are freed to focus on strategic initiatives rather than troubleshooting.
“The biggest thing is that operations are smooth,” says Purohit. “If there are no complaints, the network is doing its job.”
With a resilient cold-chain networking foundation in place, Service Foods can continue expanding confidently, knowing its infrastructure will scale alongside the business.
