Kitchen Automation Sensors — Letting chefs be chefs.
The Internet-of-Things, also known as IoT is an ever-increasing network of interconnected sensing devices, from wearables to vehicles — IoT has been used by businesses’ to help disrupt conventional processes and challenge the way data is collected, exchanged and analyzed.
Line-of-site into back-of-house kitchen operations has always been a challenge for large food-service companies, relying heavily on manual time-consuming processes that are predisposed to human error. Predominately the monitoring and recording of various temperatures within a kitchen to ensure safe quality food has been done by kitchen staff, taking them away from their core competencies. From your kitchens walk-in cooler to a remote train powering through the Alaska Wilderness — sensors can connect and automate food safety in all locations and on all levels of scale.
One of the most successful and business-relevant IoT applications Compass Digital Labs delivers is an automated Food-Safety solution. The solution allows for 24/7–365 visibility into cold & hot storage unit temperatures from anywhere at any time. By logging into an application dashboard on a phone or desktop, users get real-time temperature updates. This is made possible by a series of interconnected temperature sensors that capture, collect and transmit ambient air-temperature data every 10 minutes; that is 144 times a day. The temperature and humidity data is then recorded and transmitted in real-time. If temperatures fall into an unsafe range staff is immediately alerted to take action.
Today’s Corporate Food-Safety policies mandate operators to take 3 temperature recordings a day per food storage unit — OPEN, MID-DAY & CLOSE which are logged on a tracking sheet and stored in a binder or filing cabinet for at least 3 months, majority of the time, never looked at or touched again. The manual process takes the Chef and Kitchen staff away from their core-competency of food production. By automating the temperature log process, Kitchen and front line staff can spend more time focusing on the quality of the food and quality of hospitality, letting them do what they do best.
To date, in the year 2018 via the Food-Safety IoT program, we have deployed 617 sensors which have captured 3.2M Temperatures across 30 sites within North America, compared to 450K manually recorded temperatures If the 30 sites still used the conventional process, this equates to roughly 15,000 hours re-allocated by connecting the kitchen via IoT technology.
We have only begun to scratch the surface of the potential IoT brings to connected kitchens, at the end of the day the real value of an IoT solution relies on the data that it captures and the actionable insights created from
