How Hershey’s Ice Cream Modernized Food Safety and Cut Investigation Time with Coram

A Legacy Built on Trust and Held Back by Outdated Visibility

For over 125 years, Hershey’s Ice Cream has been a family-owned American institution. Founded in 1894, it is now a leading private manufacturer, producing millions of gallons annually for nationwide distribution. Rooted in family values, the company views food safety as a core operating principle essential to maintaining its century-old brand equity.

However, legacy camera systems hindered these standards. Grainy footage and poor placement forced teams to manually review hours of video during incidents, leading to lost time, wasted product, and operational friction.

This inefficiency was most critical during metal detector alerts. Lacking precise visibility, Hershey’s often had to halt production, dismantle lines, and discard significant product volumes to ensure safety. While necessary for trust, this unsustainable process resulted in costly downtime and excessive waste.

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Choosing a System That Could Actually See What 
Was Happing

As Hershey evaluated options to modernize their security system, the team looked closely at how AI was changing what video security could actually do. Traditional motion detection generated constant false positives and still required a human to interpret what showed up. That wasn't the future Hershey's wanted to invest in.

Coram stood out for a few specific reasons:

• AI that goes beyond motion alerts: Track people across cameras, identify attributes like clothing, and recognize vehicles by make and model
• Works with existing cameras: No rip-and-replace, significantly reducing cost and deployment time
• Enterprise capabilities without the overhead: Advanced functionality without the high cost
• Built for cross-functional use: One intuitive platform used by production, food safety, HR, and IT

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A System That Could Actually See What Was Happening

Because Coram is camera-agnostic, the rollout was straightforward. Hershey’s was able to layer the platform on top of its existing infrastructure rather than replacing hardware. That decision compressed the deployment timeline, reduced total project cost, and made adoption across teams seamless.

Once live, Coram quickly became a daily-use platform across Hershey’s facilities — transforming passive footage into an active system of intelligence used by production, food safety, HR, and IT alike.

What Mexia Is Doing with Coram

• Search anything in seconds: Locate a person, package, or vehicle instantly using natural language and visual attributes — not timestamps
• Track movement across the facility: Follow individuals or products across multiple cameras with automatic journey tracking
• Trace products through production: Validate exactly what happened, when, and where — critical for food safety investigations
• See what matters in real time: Eliminate constant monitoring as Coram surfaces and alerts on relevant activity
• Enable every team with one platform: A single, intuitive interface used across production, food safety, HR, and IT

The difference is most visible when something goes wrong. What once required hours of manual video review is now reduced to a targeted search — allowing teams to jump directly to the moment that matters and get production back up faster.

In high-stakes scenarios like metal detector alerts, the impact is even greater. Instead of shutting down entire lines and discarding large volumes of product as a precaution, Hershey’s can now isolate the exact window of risk — reducing waste, protecting margins, and avoiding unnecessary disruption.

Beyond operational efficiency, Coram reinforces what matters most: trust. With full traceability across the facility and a verifiable record of every event, Hershey’s can confidently uphold its food safety standards while improving employee safety on the floor.

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