Have you ever had to sort through historical food safety logs? It’s a tedious process that probably made you wish there was a way to snap your fingers and have it all magically organized.
While that scenario isn’t quite possible, food safety doesn’t have to be so painful. We’re in the midst of a digital revolution in the food safety industry, helping to automate food storage, prep, and serving while being fully compliant and accurately tracked.
This is what we call digital food safety. So, what is it?
What is Digital Food Safety?
Digital food safety is the automation and digitization of food safety tasks from traditional and manual practices. Compliance tasks and procedures are loaded into software designed to automate and digitally track compliance, for a more efficient food safety approach.
And, what makes digital food safety better than a traditional method?
Why digital food safety features are important
Remote temperature sensors and Bluetooth pyrometers prevent inventory loss and improve staff efficiency
With a digitized food safety system, you can rely on technology like remote sensors and bluetooth pyrometers to take accurate and consistent temperature checks.
With remote temperature sensors placed in your temperature-sensitive locations like freezers, walk-in coolers, and cold storage, you can avoid any potential inventory loss. If you were to lose power or one of these machines malfunctioned, the sensor triggers an alert that allows you to take action before suffering major inventory loss. These sensors also automatically log temperatures, so your constant compliance is documented.
Bluetooth thermometers save your staff time by automating temperature logging. The Bluetooth-enabled device is connected to the food safety software, capturing and automatically logging temperatures into their appropriate reports. This allows your staff to move through temperature checks more quickly, with no shuffling of papers.
Digital checklists offer transparency
Converting paper checklists to a digital system is beneficial for many reasons, but most notably, the constant transparency into task completion. This allows for better oversight and understanding of day to day operations and compliance in each location.
Digital checklists allow you to compile all food safety tasks into one location rather than disparate sheets of paper and books, with a connected dashboard for consolidation of this data. To read up on all of the benefits of using digital checklists, check out our post “Digital Checklists: The Ultimate Guide for Restaurants”.
Corrective actions ensure compliance
Even with a digital food safety system, you’ll want a safeguard in place to ensure that every task completed meets compliance guidelines. A good food safety software will include corrective actions, prompted when a task is either skipped or has not met safety requirements. With corrective actions, you can feel more confident that everyday operations are consistently high quality.
Automated food safety reports mean easier inspections
All of the benefits above will feed into a centralized and automated data dashboard ready for review at any time. Your food safety and compliance logs will be easily digestible and more importantly, shareable with no manual analysis or compilation involved.
You can forget the hours spent preparing for inspections with stacks of paper. You’ll always be prepared for surprise inspections, with compliance reports at the ready.
Food safety is one of the last tasks in a food service environment to see innovation. You’ve likely already updated your POS and ordering systems, and this trend will continue into back of house operations as well.