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“I have never encountered an industry where the deep, enormous dissatisfaction with every single product that they pay hundreds of thousands of dollars a year for is so widespread… Most dislike the system they use. For many, ‘dislike’ isn't a strong enough term.”
That’s how Keilly Witman, a longtime refrigeration compliance consultant, describes the typical grocery store’s experience with software that’s supposed to help manage refrigeration and HVAC systems. In supermarkets, keeping these systems running and compliant is mission-critical—but the software tools meant to help are often a constant source of frustration.
Grocery facility managers and technicians aren’t exactly software enthusiasts; they care about fixing fridges and keeping food cold, not fussing with cloud integrations or data layers. Yet they know all too well that their current patchwork of siloed software for work orders, refrigerant tracking, leak detection, controls, and sustainability reporting isn’t working for them. The result? Compliance headaches, wasted labor, and, as Keilly alluded to, swearing at computer screens.
Why is dissatisfaction so universal? We think the root cause is software fragmentation. Over the years, grocers have adopted one software tool for maintenance work orders, another for refrigerant compliance, separate systems for detecting leaks, yet another for energy management and controls, and perhaps a spreadsheet or portal for sustainability metrics. None of these tools talk to each other.
Technicians and managers spend precious time re-entering data in multiple places or manually cobbling together reports from disparate systems. As Witman told us, supermarkets are “spending so much time and energy with bad software trying to keep track of compliance, they don’t have any time left to think about anything else.” The burden of simply using these tools is so high that teams struggle to be proactive about efficiency or improvements.
How did we get here, and what exactly makes each of these siloed tools so painful? Let’s examine the key software systems in a typical grocery facility's toolkit—work order or maintenance management, refrigerant tracking, leak detection, supervisory control, and sustainability reporting—and why their isolation creates such grief.
We’ll also examine how the vendor marketplace are making compelling inroads on this. We’re seeing new partnerships, integration, and product update announcements regularly. One relatively new player in retail, Facilio, is tying these pieces together into a unified whole. Read on for a hype-free look at a problem that has long vexed grocery FMs, plus an exploration of whether a more integrated approach can finally relieve their pain.
Nearly every grocer uses a CMMS (Computerized Maintenance Management System) or work order software application to manage facility maintenance. This is the system where store managers or technicians create work orders, dispatch service calls, and record repairs—from leaky faucets to broken freezers.
In the refrigeration context, when a leak occurs in a case or rack, a work order gets generated to fix it. Often, details like how many pounds of refrigerant were added during the repair get logged in the work order system for invoicing purposes. It didn’t take long for CMMS vendors to think: “We’re already capturing data about leak repairs in work orders… why not funnel that into a refrigerant compliance module?”
On paper, that sounds sensible—why have a separate refrigerant tracking system if the maintenance software already knows when leaks are fixed and how much refrigerant was used? In practice, it has been a flop. The work order system only sees one slice of what’s needed for regulatory compliance. “Leaks are just one of the seven types of service events that trigger compliance obligations,” Witman notes, referring to EPA rules that require tracking all kinds of refrigerant transfers (installing new equipment, decommissioning units, etc., not just fixing leaks) and event service events like mandatory leak inspections and ALDS calibrations that don't involve any refrigerant add at all.
The CMMS focuses on maintenance tasks, which means it misses many compliance events outside of repair work. Even for leaks, the data captured in a work order (e.g. refrigerant added) is only a subset of what’s required for full documentation.
Crucially, most CMMS-based refrigerant modules were bolt-on afterthoughts, not deeply developed solutions. Witman recounts how one popular work order platform touted its new refrigerant tracking capabilities—only for grocers to discover it covered “like 20% of what I need.”
The vendor’s strategy, she says, was to chase a quick buck by adding a checkbox feature, without truly understanding the complexity of refrigerant compliance. The outcome is predictable: universal user frustration. Grocery compliance managers still end up doing double data entry or maintaining separate spreadsheets because the CMMS module leaves huge gaps.
Grocers adopted these tools hoping to streamline their workflow, only to be burned when audits came around and the system couldn’t spit out required reports or missed critical leak follow-ups. One major supermarket got so fed up, Witman says, that they attempted to build their own refrigerant tracking software from scratch rather than continue struggling with a deficient product.
The bottom line: a work order system is great for dispatching a contractor to fix a leak, but by itself it’s lousy at ensuring you comply with refrigerant regulations. So grocers also need to buy a… refrigerant management system.
Recognizing that maintenance software alone couldn’t handle the job, specialized Refrigerant Management Software (RMS) emerged. These are purpose-built tools for tracking refrigerant purchases, leak logs, service records, and compliance paperwork (often used to compile EPA Section 608 reports). In theory, an RMS is exactly what grocers need to stay on top of leak rates and regulatory requirements. In practice, the legacy RMS options haven’t fared much better in user satisfaction.
Witman called the leading RMS “the best of the worst—the best of a bunch of really bad options”.
One issue has been lack of integration: TrakRef doesn’t include a work order management component, Parasense’s software focuses was mainly on leak alarms, etc. So even if a grocer deployed an RMS, they still had to use a separate CMMS for dispatching technicians and a separate system for real-time leak detection.
No single system can “close the loop”—for example, ensuring the contractor who recharged the system after a leak does the compliance paperwork in the RMS before their work order gets closed in the CMMS (and they can get paid for their site visit).
Usability has also been a sore point. Technicians and compliance admins have often found RMS software clunky and unintuitive. Even with training, busy facility staff struggle to correctly input data, leading to errors or missing information. Basant Singhatwadia of Facilio observed, "What data elements one needs for a particular event is unclear... a lot of stuff gets missed in older tools with outdated form design." Given that even minor recordkeeping mistakes can result in EPA fines, these usability issues are more than just annoyances.
The RMS market has recently seen consolidation inroads. TrakRef was acquired by Fexa (a CMMS vendor) in 2022, and Parasense’s assets were acquired by leak detection competitor MSA Safety (who then did a deal to integrate with JLL’s CMMS vendor Corrigo). Essentially, larger facility maintenance software firms scooped up the niche refrigerant tools—perhaps hoping to fold them into broader offerings. Yet this hasn’t magically improved user happiness. Fexa only announced an integration with TrakRef in March 2025, nearly 2 years after the acquisition.
Witman, who has worked with many grocery chains on refrigerant compliance, still hears the same complaints about every product on the market. “Every single company that is required to spend enormous amounts of money and time documenting all this stuff… almost all strongly dislike the system that they’re using” she emphasizes. Some supermarkets have even resorted to hiring extra staff whose entire job is to wrestle data out of these systems and piece together compliance reports manually.
In 2023, the executive director of NASRC (a refrigeration non-profit) noted that a robust workforce is needed just to help supermarkets transition to new refrigerants and maintain compliance—yet the industry is facing a technician shortage, with about 15% of refrigeration techs leaving the field each year and only 6% entering. In other words, grocers can’t afford to have their limited staff wasting hours as human glue between siloed software.
For all these reasons, the holy grail has been to connect the maintenance, refrigerant tracking, and leak detection pieces together. “The opportunity with integrating the work order management with the refrigerant tracking with the leak detection is like the Holy Trinity for me,” says Witman.
Refrigerant leak detection deserves its own discussion. Grocery stores leak a lot of refrigerant – on average about 25% of their refrigerant charge each year, as we covered a few weeks ago. Leak detection and response is critical both for compliance (EPA requires prompt repair and record of any leak over a certain threshold) and for cost control.
Historically, grocers have used two main approaches to catch leaks: direct leak detection sensors and indirect analytics. Direct leak detection involves physical sensors (infrared, electrochemical, etc.) placed near equipment to sniff for escaping refrigerant. Companies like Bacharach (now MSA Bacharach) and Parasense have long provided such hardware, often connected to an alarm panel that might dial out or alert when a leak is detected.
Indirect leak detection, often called continuous or slow leak detection, relies on monitoring refrigeration system data (temperatures, pressures, compressor runtimes) via the control system and using algorithms to infer if a leak is occurring. Several modern software vendors—Axiom Cloud, Bueno Analytics, Emerson, Danfoss, and more—offer analytics that can flag a likely slow leak in a case or rack by spotting anomalies in sensor data.
The bad news: these systems often operate in yet another silo. The software might send an email or show a dashboard that “Leak detected at Case #5 in Store 123.” But that alert typically doesn’t automatically create a work order in the CMMS, nor does it log the leak compliance event in the refrigerant management system.
In a fully integrated world, a leak alarm would trigger a repair ticket and populate the compliance record without human intervention, ensuring nothing falls through the cracks. It's a requirement in several states to send someone to respond to every leak within 24 hours, after all. Ideally, the leak detection algorithm itself is also informed by data in the CMMS, such as whether past leak alarms were confirmed by the technician in the field. Bueno’s Leon Wurfel told us that they’ve made inroads with this in their indirect leak detection driven by fault detection and diagnostics technology.
But in most deployments, “there’s this misconception that a leak is identified and that data is recorded and input into a system—that is 100% not the case,” says Basant Singhatwadia, who has overseen software development in this arena going back to his days at Verisae. “A leak detection system is pretty stupid at the end of the day… it’s like, you have a leak, [alarm sounds], but then nothing happens next by itself” (i.e. someone still has to go log it somewhere).
Because leak detection, maintenance, and compliance systems don’t talk to each other, grocers often struggle to operationalize their leak alerts. Technicians might receive a text or email from the leak detection software, then have to pivot into a different app to dispatch a service call, then later remember to input details into the compliance log. It’s easy to see how things get missed. Indeed, many EPA fines have stemmed not from failing to detect leaks, but from failing to repair them in time or file proper documentation. Detecting the leak is not a resolution in and of itself. It's the first step in a multistep leak resolution process.
Leak detection systems have huge potential to reduce refrigerant loss and maintenance costs by catching issues early. But as standalone tools that aren’t integrated with maintenance workflows, they often add another screen to check and another set of alarms to manage. Without integration, they risk becoming just “noise” or extra work. The full benefit comes only when leak detection is tied into work orders and compliance tracking. Few grocers have achieved that level of integration to date.
Beyond maintenance and refrigerant-specific tools, supermarkets also employ energy management and controls software. Most grocery stores have some form of Building or Refrigeration Control System (like Emerson E2 or Danfoss controllers) to automate temperatures, defrost cycles, lighting, HVAC, etc. Traditionally, those controllers are managed on-site or with manufacturer-specific software. In the last decade, however, third-party “overlay” platforms emerged to optimize controls across portfolios—companies like PhoenixET, IMS Evolve, Facil.ai, and Axiom Cloud (and before them Verisae’s EMS platform, more on that soon) offer cloud-based analytics and control capabilities. These can do things like demand management (e.g. raising freezer setpoints a bit during a peak electricity price interval to shed load) or fault detection and diagnostics using combined data from multiple systems.
These supervisory control tools hold a lot of promise: they can save energy (often 5-10% in refrigeration electricity use) and provide enterprise-level visibility into what’s happening across hundreds of stores. For instance, PhoenixET recently partnered with a refrigeration manufacturer (Hussmann) to combine Phoenix’s analytics with Hussmann’s leak detection sensors in a solution called “RefrigerationIQ,” aiming to unite controls, energy analytics, and leak detection in one platform. This is another good sign of the convergence everyone wants.
One issue is that energy/controls platforms often lives in a different department (energy or engineering managers vs. maintenance managers or service technicians), furthering the silo effect. They might generate insights but that insight then has to be passed to a maintenance team to take action (clean the condenser, etc.). If the insight and the work order reside in different systems, there’s a disconnect.
Verisae (later Accruent) created a product called Vx Observe that many grocers used for exactly this kind of portfolio controls optimization, and users reported 5-7% energy savings from centrally tweaking setpoints and monitoring equipment health. The key was the ability to do enterprise control changes—something still relatively unique. “It was the only software that could do enterprise control changes,” Singhatwadia says of the legacy Verisae system, describing how one client with 2,000 sites was raising and lowering HVAC setpoints at scale.
Clearly, having that centralized control yields benefits. But if that capability isn’t tied into maintenance and refrigeration workflows, it’s yet another semi-isolated tool: great for the energy team, not directly helping the guy who fixes the fridge because it remains siloed relative to the maintenance and compliance processes.
Finally, an often overlooked software silo in grocery facility management is the sustainability or EHS (Environmental Health & Safety) reporting tool. Many companies have pledged to reduce those emissions or transition to lower-GWP refrigerants by certain dates. For example, ALDI, Target, and Walmart have public commitments to phase out HFCs, and regulations are accelerating this transition with an 85% phasedown of HFC production by 2036 in the U.S.
The AIM Act and state laws mean grocers will need to adopt new cooling systems (like CO₂ or ammonia or propane)—an expensive proposition (up to $5 million or more per store to convert HVACR hardware). In the meantime, reducing leaks and improving maintenance isn’t just about compliance and cost; it’s about hitting sustainability targets and avoiding high refrigerant prices as HFC supply tightens.
You would think refrigerant management systems would seamlessly feed into a company’s sustainability dashboards. But because of all the silos we described, sustainability managers often end up chasing data. Refrigerant leak volumes are in the RMS or CMMS, energy usage is in the utilities database or energy management software, capital project plans and service records are elsewhere. Bringing it together for, say, an annual carbon footprint report means manually pulling numbers from each system.
Some grocers use broader EHS platforms or sustainability software where a refrigerant module is just one part of a corporate-wide system (think enterprise carbon accounting tools). These tend to be even further removed from daily facility operations—often managed by a sustainability department that must beg the facilities team for data exports. The end result is delayed insight and sometimes inaccurate data, since every handoff is an opportunity for error.
A very small percentage of supermarkets take the data from their leak tracking and translate it into an actionable leak reduction plan, says Witman – most are “so far behind the curve” just playing whack-a-mole with compliance issues that proactive improvement gets lost.
The maintenance team, the compliance folks, the energy managers, and sustainability officers are all on different pages (often literally different software pages). As Basant Singhatwadia lamented, the poor user might be looking at “seven, eight different software tools to make sure their needs are met”.
There simply hasn’t been an obvious alternative; you either bought the disjointed tools and slogged through, or you built your own custom solution (a path few have resources for).
Over the years, we’ve seen attempts to end this fragmentation and bring each of these silos together. We’ve seen several acquisition or partnership efforts mentioned above. PhoenixET’s partnership with Hussmann we mentioned is one example of combining silos. Fexa acquiring TrakRef, ServiceChannel adding analytics features, etc., are moves in that direction.
One early and notable convergence effort was made by the Verisae/Accruent suite: Verisae branded their suite as an integrated platform covering maintenance (vx Maintain), field service (vx Field), controls (vx Observe), and sustainability compliance (vx Sustain). For a while, it was arguably the closest thing to the coveted single pane of glass that grocery FMs had seen.
But that effort seems to have fizzled since Accruent was bought by Fortive for $2 billion in 2018. Development on the original Verisae products slowed, integrations between applications remained clunky, and it’s become clear that simply acquiring or bundling all the pieces isn’t enough.
So, is there hope for grocery teams who just want one modern system that actually works? This desire mirrors what building owners in other verticals are looking for. We heard from one office REIT just last week that is struggling navigating different but similar software silos: CMMS, FDD, Supervisory Control, Energy Management, and Sustainability Reporting.
A growing consensus in the smart buildings industry is that the solution lies in a unified data layer that connects to all the underlying equipment and point solutions, combined with flexible but integrated applications on top. Our 2021 white paper State of Property Operations & Maintenance Software explained that today’s building O&M landscape is “extremely complex, decentralized, and fragmented in terms of data, applications, and services,” with valuable data locked away in disparate systems.
With data centralized (but still sourced from wherever it lives), you can then build applications that serve each individual user group and their workflows. This is exactly the philosophy behind the overlay model that Facilio is pursuing. At the application layer, users get a modular experience: if you need a refrigerant compliance app, you have it; if you also need a work order app, you add it; if later you want to plug in an AI fault detection module or a sustainability dashboard, that can be spun up too. All share the same data backbone, so they naturally work in concert.
What Facilio is promising the full application suite built on modern cloud tech and an open integration mindset. They’ve developed a refrigerant management module in partnership with industry experts (Facilio even hired Witman to advise them on her dream software).
They have a native CMMS/work order module (originating from their roots in commercial real estate facilities management). They’re working on leak detection capabilities that can either ingest data from existing sensor systems, leak detection software providers, or crunch the numbers themselves. And they have energy monitoring and control capabilities that integrate with refrigeration and HVAC equipment (Facilio’s team has written interfaces for common grocery controllers).
The key difference is that all these pieces are part of one coherent platform, sharing data in real time. It’s not a suite of acquired products held together with duct tape; it’s one architecture. That means, for example, when Facilio’s leak detection algorithm suspects a slow leak, it can automatically generate a leak event in the compliance module and create a work order for a tech to investigate—all within the same system. “We can provide a holistic compliance solution,” Singhatwadia.
To be clear, Facilio isn’t the only one chasing this vision. Other software firms are also moving toward broader integration across verticals. What’s notable is that Facilio is focusing specifically on the grocery vertical as a proving ground, and has built the refrigerant compliance piece which few others have. This is perhaps why Witman said, “Facilio really is the first company I’ve run into that has all three” of the holy trinity (work orders, refrigerant tracking, leak detection) on one platform.
Facilio has started to land pilots and contracts with major grocery names—in our interviews, they referenced signing up regional grocery chains and even a national retailer’s distribution centers. For grocers, their converged data layer + integrated applications could mean one platform where the facilities engineer can see an alarm, acknowledge it, dispatch a tech (internal or external), ensure the compliance record is updated, and analyze performance trends from tech stack.
Of course, the proof is in the pudding (or the freezer case, as it were). Facilio’s approach will need to demonstrate that it truly delivers a better user experience and tangible ROI. The skepticism is healthy—grocers have heard many vendor promises over the years. The difference this time is that the technology landscape may finally be ready to support the vision (cloud computing, APIs, IoT maturity, and an industry more open to change). Also, the pain has grown so acute that retailers are actively seeking alternatives. As Witman wryly noted, supermarkets are not shy about voicing dissatisfaction, yet “up until now, there just hasn’t been a good solution… so they just kind of suck it up and do the best they can”. Now that viable integrated solutions are emerging, the days of having to just “suck it up” may be ending.
The benefits seem clear: reduced software license costs (one platform versus five), labor savings from automation (no more hunting through records or typing the same data twice), fewer regulatory slip-ups, and better decision-making from having all data in one view. It could also improve life for the overworked technicians and facility managers by cutting out busywork—as Witman put it, why are people with six-figure salaries spending time hunting through records or manually typing out work orders?.
The grocery industry tends to be pragmatic. They won’t adopt new software just because it’s cool; it has to solve their problems in a practical, no-hype way. The overlay/platform approach must prove that it can truly cut through the complexity and simplify life for the user on the ground. In an arena where hate for software has been the status quo, that prospect is enticing. Now it’s up to the new generation of platforms to deliver.
“I have never encountered an industry where the deep, enormous dissatisfaction with every single product that they pay hundreds of thousands of dollars a year for is so widespread… Most dislike the system they use. For many, ‘dislike’ isn't a strong enough term.”
That’s how Keilly Witman, a longtime refrigeration compliance consultant, describes the typical grocery store’s experience with software that’s supposed to help manage refrigeration and HVAC systems. In supermarkets, keeping these systems running and compliant is mission-critical—but the software tools meant to help are often a constant source of frustration.
Grocery facility managers and technicians aren’t exactly software enthusiasts; they care about fixing fridges and keeping food cold, not fussing with cloud integrations or data layers. Yet they know all too well that their current patchwork of siloed software for work orders, refrigerant tracking, leak detection, controls, and sustainability reporting isn’t working for them. The result? Compliance headaches, wasted labor, and, as Keilly alluded to, swearing at computer screens.
Why is dissatisfaction so universal? We think the root cause is software fragmentation. Over the years, grocers have adopted one software tool for maintenance work orders, another for refrigerant compliance, separate systems for detecting leaks, yet another for energy management and controls, and perhaps a spreadsheet or portal for sustainability metrics. None of these tools talk to each other.
Technicians and managers spend precious time re-entering data in multiple places or manually cobbling together reports from disparate systems. As Witman told us, supermarkets are “spending so much time and energy with bad software trying to keep track of compliance, they don’t have any time left to think about anything else.” The burden of simply using these tools is so high that teams struggle to be proactive about efficiency or improvements.
How did we get here, and what exactly makes each of these siloed tools so painful? Let’s examine the key software systems in a typical grocery facility's toolkit—work order or maintenance management, refrigerant tracking, leak detection, supervisory control, and sustainability reporting—and why their isolation creates such grief.
We’ll also examine how the vendor marketplace are making compelling inroads on this. We’re seeing new partnerships, integration, and product update announcements regularly. One relatively new player in retail, Facilio, is tying these pieces together into a unified whole. Read on for a hype-free look at a problem that has long vexed grocery FMs, plus an exploration of whether a more integrated approach can finally relieve their pain.
Nearly every grocer uses a CMMS (Computerized Maintenance Management System) or work order software application to manage facility maintenance. This is the system where store managers or technicians create work orders, dispatch service calls, and record repairs—from leaky faucets to broken freezers.
In the refrigeration context, when a leak occurs in a case or rack, a work order gets generated to fix it. Often, details like how many pounds of refrigerant were added during the repair get logged in the work order system for invoicing purposes. It didn’t take long for CMMS vendors to think: “We’re already capturing data about leak repairs in work orders… why not funnel that into a refrigerant compliance module?”
On paper, that sounds sensible—why have a separate refrigerant tracking system if the maintenance software already knows when leaks are fixed and how much refrigerant was used? In practice, it has been a flop. The work order system only sees one slice of what’s needed for regulatory compliance. “Leaks are just one of the seven types of service events that trigger compliance obligations,” Witman notes, referring to EPA rules that require tracking all kinds of refrigerant transfers (installing new equipment, decommissioning units, etc., not just fixing leaks) and event service events like mandatory leak inspections and ALDS calibrations that don't involve any refrigerant add at all.
The CMMS focuses on maintenance tasks, which means it misses many compliance events outside of repair work. Even for leaks, the data captured in a work order (e.g. refrigerant added) is only a subset of what’s required for full documentation.
Crucially, most CMMS-based refrigerant modules were bolt-on afterthoughts, not deeply developed solutions. Witman recounts how one popular work order platform touted its new refrigerant tracking capabilities—only for grocers to discover it covered “like 20% of what I need.”
The vendor’s strategy, she says, was to chase a quick buck by adding a checkbox feature, without truly understanding the complexity of refrigerant compliance. The outcome is predictable: universal user frustration. Grocery compliance managers still end up doing double data entry or maintaining separate spreadsheets because the CMMS module leaves huge gaps.
Grocers adopted these tools hoping to streamline their workflow, only to be burned when audits came around and the system couldn’t spit out required reports or missed critical leak follow-ups. One major supermarket got so fed up, Witman says, that they attempted to build their own refrigerant tracking software from scratch rather than continue struggling with a deficient product.
The bottom line: a work order system is great for dispatching a contractor to fix a leak, but by itself it’s lousy at ensuring you comply with refrigerant regulations. So grocers also need to buy a… refrigerant management system.
Recognizing that maintenance software alone couldn’t handle the job, specialized Refrigerant Management Software (RMS) emerged. These are purpose-built tools for tracking refrigerant purchases, leak logs, service records, and compliance paperwork (often used to compile EPA Section 608 reports). In theory, an RMS is exactly what grocers need to stay on top of leak rates and regulatory requirements. In practice, the legacy RMS options haven’t fared much better in user satisfaction.
Witman called the leading RMS “the best of the worst—the best of a bunch of really bad options”.
One issue has been lack of integration: TrakRef doesn’t include a work order management component, Parasense’s software focuses was mainly on leak alarms, etc. So even if a grocer deployed an RMS, they still had to use a separate CMMS for dispatching technicians and a separate system for real-time leak detection.
No single system can “close the loop”—for example, ensuring the contractor who recharged the system after a leak does the compliance paperwork in the RMS before their work order gets closed in the CMMS (and they can get paid for their site visit).
Usability has also been a sore point. Technicians and compliance admins have often found RMS software clunky and unintuitive. Even with training, busy facility staff struggle to correctly input data, leading to errors or missing information. Basant Singhatwadia of Facilio observed, "What data elements one needs for a particular event is unclear... a lot of stuff gets missed in older tools with outdated form design." Given that even minor recordkeeping mistakes can result in EPA fines, these usability issues are more than just annoyances.
The RMS market has recently seen consolidation inroads. TrakRef was acquired by Fexa (a CMMS vendor) in 2022, and Parasense’s assets were acquired by leak detection competitor MSA Safety (who then did a deal to integrate with JLL’s CMMS vendor Corrigo). Essentially, larger facility maintenance software firms scooped up the niche refrigerant tools—perhaps hoping to fold them into broader offerings. Yet this hasn’t magically improved user happiness. Fexa only announced an integration with TrakRef in March 2025, nearly 2 years after the acquisition.
Witman, who has worked with many grocery chains on refrigerant compliance, still hears the same complaints about every product on the market. “Every single company that is required to spend enormous amounts of money and time documenting all this stuff… almost all strongly dislike the system that they’re using” she emphasizes. Some supermarkets have even resorted to hiring extra staff whose entire job is to wrestle data out of these systems and piece together compliance reports manually.
In 2023, the executive director of NASRC (a refrigeration non-profit) noted that a robust workforce is needed just to help supermarkets transition to new refrigerants and maintain compliance—yet the industry is facing a technician shortage, with about 15% of refrigeration techs leaving the field each year and only 6% entering. In other words, grocers can’t afford to have their limited staff wasting hours as human glue between siloed software.
For all these reasons, the holy grail has been to connect the maintenance, refrigerant tracking, and leak detection pieces together. “The opportunity with integrating the work order management with the refrigerant tracking with the leak detection is like the Holy Trinity for me,” says Witman.
Refrigerant leak detection deserves its own discussion. Grocery stores leak a lot of refrigerant – on average about 25% of their refrigerant charge each year, as we covered a few weeks ago. Leak detection and response is critical both for compliance (EPA requires prompt repair and record of any leak over a certain threshold) and for cost control.
Historically, grocers have used two main approaches to catch leaks: direct leak detection sensors and indirect analytics. Direct leak detection involves physical sensors (infrared, electrochemical, etc.) placed near equipment to sniff for escaping refrigerant. Companies like Bacharach (now MSA Bacharach) and Parasense have long provided such hardware, often connected to an alarm panel that might dial out or alert when a leak is detected.
Indirect leak detection, often called continuous or slow leak detection, relies on monitoring refrigeration system data (temperatures, pressures, compressor runtimes) via the control system and using algorithms to infer if a leak is occurring. Several modern software vendors—Axiom Cloud, Bueno Analytics, Emerson, Danfoss, and more—offer analytics that can flag a likely slow leak in a case or rack by spotting anomalies in sensor data.
The bad news: these systems often operate in yet another silo. The software might send an email or show a dashboard that “Leak detected at Case #5 in Store 123.” But that alert typically doesn’t automatically create a work order in the CMMS, nor does it log the leak compliance event in the refrigerant management system.
In a fully integrated world, a leak alarm would trigger a repair ticket and populate the compliance record without human intervention, ensuring nothing falls through the cracks. It's a requirement in several states to send someone to respond to every leak within 24 hours, after all. Ideally, the leak detection algorithm itself is also informed by data in the CMMS, such as whether past leak alarms were confirmed by the technician in the field. Bueno’s Leon Wurfel told us that they’ve made inroads with this in their indirect leak detection driven by fault detection and diagnostics technology.
But in most deployments, “there’s this misconception that a leak is identified and that data is recorded and input into a system—that is 100% not the case,” says Basant Singhatwadia, who has overseen software development in this arena going back to his days at Verisae. “A leak detection system is pretty stupid at the end of the day… it’s like, you have a leak, [alarm sounds], but then nothing happens next by itself” (i.e. someone still has to go log it somewhere).
Because leak detection, maintenance, and compliance systems don’t talk to each other, grocers often struggle to operationalize their leak alerts. Technicians might receive a text or email from the leak detection software, then have to pivot into a different app to dispatch a service call, then later remember to input details into the compliance log. It’s easy to see how things get missed. Indeed, many EPA fines have stemmed not from failing to detect leaks, but from failing to repair them in time or file proper documentation. Detecting the leak is not a resolution in and of itself. It's the first step in a multistep leak resolution process.
Leak detection systems have huge potential to reduce refrigerant loss and maintenance costs by catching issues early. But as standalone tools that aren’t integrated with maintenance workflows, they often add another screen to check and another set of alarms to manage. Without integration, they risk becoming just “noise” or extra work. The full benefit comes only when leak detection is tied into work orders and compliance tracking. Few grocers have achieved that level of integration to date.
Beyond maintenance and refrigerant-specific tools, supermarkets also employ energy management and controls software. Most grocery stores have some form of Building or Refrigeration Control System (like Emerson E2 or Danfoss controllers) to automate temperatures, defrost cycles, lighting, HVAC, etc. Traditionally, those controllers are managed on-site or with manufacturer-specific software. In the last decade, however, third-party “overlay” platforms emerged to optimize controls across portfolios—companies like PhoenixET, IMS Evolve, Facil.ai, and Axiom Cloud (and before them Verisae’s EMS platform, more on that soon) offer cloud-based analytics and control capabilities. These can do things like demand management (e.g. raising freezer setpoints a bit during a peak electricity price interval to shed load) or fault detection and diagnostics using combined data from multiple systems.
These supervisory control tools hold a lot of promise: they can save energy (often 5-10% in refrigeration electricity use) and provide enterprise-level visibility into what’s happening across hundreds of stores. For instance, PhoenixET recently partnered with a refrigeration manufacturer (Hussmann) to combine Phoenix’s analytics with Hussmann’s leak detection sensors in a solution called “RefrigerationIQ,” aiming to unite controls, energy analytics, and leak detection in one platform. This is another good sign of the convergence everyone wants.
One issue is that energy/controls platforms often lives in a different department (energy or engineering managers vs. maintenance managers or service technicians), furthering the silo effect. They might generate insights but that insight then has to be passed to a maintenance team to take action (clean the condenser, etc.). If the insight and the work order reside in different systems, there’s a disconnect.
Verisae (later Accruent) created a product called Vx Observe that many grocers used for exactly this kind of portfolio controls optimization, and users reported 5-7% energy savings from centrally tweaking setpoints and monitoring equipment health. The key was the ability to do enterprise control changes—something still relatively unique. “It was the only software that could do enterprise control changes,” Singhatwadia says of the legacy Verisae system, describing how one client with 2,000 sites was raising and lowering HVAC setpoints at scale.
Clearly, having that centralized control yields benefits. But if that capability isn’t tied into maintenance and refrigeration workflows, it’s yet another semi-isolated tool: great for the energy team, not directly helping the guy who fixes the fridge because it remains siloed relative to the maintenance and compliance processes.
Finally, an often overlooked software silo in grocery facility management is the sustainability or EHS (Environmental Health & Safety) reporting tool. Many companies have pledged to reduce those emissions or transition to lower-GWP refrigerants by certain dates. For example, ALDI, Target, and Walmart have public commitments to phase out HFCs, and regulations are accelerating this transition with an 85% phasedown of HFC production by 2036 in the U.S.
The AIM Act and state laws mean grocers will need to adopt new cooling systems (like CO₂ or ammonia or propane)—an expensive proposition (up to $5 million or more per store to convert HVACR hardware). In the meantime, reducing leaks and improving maintenance isn’t just about compliance and cost; it’s about hitting sustainability targets and avoiding high refrigerant prices as HFC supply tightens.
You would think refrigerant management systems would seamlessly feed into a company’s sustainability dashboards. But because of all the silos we described, sustainability managers often end up chasing data. Refrigerant leak volumes are in the RMS or CMMS, energy usage is in the utilities database or energy management software, capital project plans and service records are elsewhere. Bringing it together for, say, an annual carbon footprint report means manually pulling numbers from each system.
Some grocers use broader EHS platforms or sustainability software where a refrigerant module is just one part of a corporate-wide system (think enterprise carbon accounting tools). These tend to be even further removed from daily facility operations—often managed by a sustainability department that must beg the facilities team for data exports. The end result is delayed insight and sometimes inaccurate data, since every handoff is an opportunity for error.
A very small percentage of supermarkets take the data from their leak tracking and translate it into an actionable leak reduction plan, says Witman – most are “so far behind the curve” just playing whack-a-mole with compliance issues that proactive improvement gets lost.
The maintenance team, the compliance folks, the energy managers, and sustainability officers are all on different pages (often literally different software pages). As Basant Singhatwadia lamented, the poor user might be looking at “seven, eight different software tools to make sure their needs are met”.
There simply hasn’t been an obvious alternative; you either bought the disjointed tools and slogged through, or you built your own custom solution (a path few have resources for).
Over the years, we’ve seen attempts to end this fragmentation and bring each of these silos together. We’ve seen several acquisition or partnership efforts mentioned above. PhoenixET’s partnership with Hussmann we mentioned is one example of combining silos. Fexa acquiring TrakRef, ServiceChannel adding analytics features, etc., are moves in that direction.
One early and notable convergence effort was made by the Verisae/Accruent suite: Verisae branded their suite as an integrated platform covering maintenance (vx Maintain), field service (vx Field), controls (vx Observe), and sustainability compliance (vx Sustain). For a while, it was arguably the closest thing to the coveted single pane of glass that grocery FMs had seen.
But that effort seems to have fizzled since Accruent was bought by Fortive for $2 billion in 2018. Development on the original Verisae products slowed, integrations between applications remained clunky, and it’s become clear that simply acquiring or bundling all the pieces isn’t enough.
So, is there hope for grocery teams who just want one modern system that actually works? This desire mirrors what building owners in other verticals are looking for. We heard from one office REIT just last week that is struggling navigating different but similar software silos: CMMS, FDD, Supervisory Control, Energy Management, and Sustainability Reporting.
A growing consensus in the smart buildings industry is that the solution lies in a unified data layer that connects to all the underlying equipment and point solutions, combined with flexible but integrated applications on top. Our 2021 white paper State of Property Operations & Maintenance Software explained that today’s building O&M landscape is “extremely complex, decentralized, and fragmented in terms of data, applications, and services,” with valuable data locked away in disparate systems.
With data centralized (but still sourced from wherever it lives), you can then build applications that serve each individual user group and their workflows. This is exactly the philosophy behind the overlay model that Facilio is pursuing. At the application layer, users get a modular experience: if you need a refrigerant compliance app, you have it; if you also need a work order app, you add it; if later you want to plug in an AI fault detection module or a sustainability dashboard, that can be spun up too. All share the same data backbone, so they naturally work in concert.
What Facilio is promising the full application suite built on modern cloud tech and an open integration mindset. They’ve developed a refrigerant management module in partnership with industry experts (Facilio even hired Witman to advise them on her dream software).
They have a native CMMS/work order module (originating from their roots in commercial real estate facilities management). They’re working on leak detection capabilities that can either ingest data from existing sensor systems, leak detection software providers, or crunch the numbers themselves. And they have energy monitoring and control capabilities that integrate with refrigeration and HVAC equipment (Facilio’s team has written interfaces for common grocery controllers).
The key difference is that all these pieces are part of one coherent platform, sharing data in real time. It’s not a suite of acquired products held together with duct tape; it’s one architecture. That means, for example, when Facilio’s leak detection algorithm suspects a slow leak, it can automatically generate a leak event in the compliance module and create a work order for a tech to investigate—all within the same system. “We can provide a holistic compliance solution,” Singhatwadia.
To be clear, Facilio isn’t the only one chasing this vision. Other software firms are also moving toward broader integration across verticals. What’s notable is that Facilio is focusing specifically on the grocery vertical as a proving ground, and has built the refrigerant compliance piece which few others have. This is perhaps why Witman said, “Facilio really is the first company I’ve run into that has all three” of the holy trinity (work orders, refrigerant tracking, leak detection) on one platform.
Facilio has started to land pilots and contracts with major grocery names—in our interviews, they referenced signing up regional grocery chains and even a national retailer’s distribution centers. For grocers, their converged data layer + integrated applications could mean one platform where the facilities engineer can see an alarm, acknowledge it, dispatch a tech (internal or external), ensure the compliance record is updated, and analyze performance trends from tech stack.
Of course, the proof is in the pudding (or the freezer case, as it were). Facilio’s approach will need to demonstrate that it truly delivers a better user experience and tangible ROI. The skepticism is healthy—grocers have heard many vendor promises over the years. The difference this time is that the technology landscape may finally be ready to support the vision (cloud computing, APIs, IoT maturity, and an industry more open to change). Also, the pain has grown so acute that retailers are actively seeking alternatives. As Witman wryly noted, supermarkets are not shy about voicing dissatisfaction, yet “up until now, there just hasn’t been a good solution… so they just kind of suck it up and do the best they can”. Now that viable integrated solutions are emerging, the days of having to just “suck it up” may be ending.
The benefits seem clear: reduced software license costs (one platform versus five), labor savings from automation (no more hunting through records or typing the same data twice), fewer regulatory slip-ups, and better decision-making from having all data in one view. It could also improve life for the overworked technicians and facility managers by cutting out busywork—as Witman put it, why are people with six-figure salaries spending time hunting through records or manually typing out work orders?.
The grocery industry tends to be pragmatic. They won’t adopt new software just because it’s cool; it has to solve their problems in a practical, no-hype way. The overlay/platform approach must prove that it can truly cut through the complexity and simplify life for the user on the ground. In an arena where hate for software has been the status quo, that prospect is enticing. Now it’s up to the new generation of platforms to deliver.
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