Balloon One launches ProFresh to cut food waste and speed up supply chains.

22 September 2025, London, UK – Balloon One, the technology partner optimising global supply chains, has launched ProFresh to address key challenges when it comes to wasted time and food. ProFresh tackles one of the toughest warehouse challenges, instantly identifying and processing fresh produce. By cutting out manual guesswork, it ensures customers get exactly what they ordered, reducing food waste and driving more efficient handling.

Existing Warehouse Management Systems (WMS) and Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems struggle to handle the complexities of fresh food, which is often unlabelled and unreliable in quantities received. Balloon One has developed ProFresh to:

• Provide a flexible solution which allows for visual identification via tablets or touch screens, rather than relying on traditional handheld scanners that cannot read non-existent labels.
• Handle varied units of measure, such as kilos, punnets and bunches, and facilitate conversions on-screen, converting inbound units to sales-required units. It also handles adjustments for over-picking and under-picking, enabling better stock accuracy than manual methods and ensuring the exact allocation of produce is being sent to customers.
• Provide employees with mobile printing capabilities to create labels on demand, improving the speed and accuracy of picking. This leads to instant and clear allocation, speeding up sorting and automatic and accurate outbound label generation.
• Offer businesses immediate visibility into excess stock, enabling better margin control, reduction in wastage, and comprehensive reporting capabilities.

John Burgess, Director of Innovation at Balloon One, said, “Many food and beverage companies and their warehouses grapple with the unique challenges posed by managing fresh produce. Items arrive unlabelled, quantities are often unreliable, and products move extremely fast. Traditional systems simply aren’t built for this level of flexibility, and this is forcing businesses to resort to manual processes. We’ve designed ProFresh to directly address these pain points, providing our food and beverage customers with a system that truly understands and adapts to the realities of fresh food logistics.”

Toby Raphael, General Manager at Albion Fine Foods, said, “When we scoped and designed our ERP and WMS project with the team at Balloon One, handling fresh produce added significant complexity such as dealing with multiple units of measure, products in different case sizes, and produce without barcodes coming directly from farms. Balloon One has taken the power of the Infios platform as a foundation and built on this, with a fully integrated solution which has led to significant efficiency gains for us, along with more transparency for our supply and planning teams. We look forward to extending our brilliant partnership with Balloon One as we collectively innovate and leverage their technology in our supply chain operations.”

The food sector presents a complex market for supply chain management, particularly concerning fresh produce. Unlabelled goods from farmers mean that warehouses traditionally need highly skilled personnel who can identify every individual item, such as different types of mushrooms or leafy greens, in the absence of barcodes. Manual weighing and counting also creates inconsistencies and inaccuracies, contributing to unclear stock allocation and excess food that doesn’t align with customer orders. This can result in delayed picking and labelling, unsustainable and costly food wastage, and errors across the supply chain, which all impact customer loyalty.

Burgess adds, “The feedback from customers already using and trialling ProFresh has been clear – they see it as a game-changer. It has allowed them to reduce their reliance on manual methods, gaining a much better view of their stock, and the time and cost optimisation that comes with this. ProFresh demonstrates our commitment to innovation through a responsible and pragmatic lens, which is allowing us to solve real-world supply chain challenges for our customers.”

You can find further information about ProFresh and how it could support your business needs here .