Here is a quick way to digitally transform your food catering operations and kitchens.
Doesn’t matter if you make 100 meals a day or 9,999 meals. Safety must come with every dish. Hot foods sitting out for over 1 to 2 hours need the same amount of safety as cold foods. Other than safety what other analytics can restaurants get from their kitchen?
Getting a Food and Beverage License
Before any business in Singapore, Taiwan, or SEA starts serving food they must first acquire a license. Usually, these licenses are granted by the Ministry of Environment and Water Resources or the Ministry of Health. From central kitchens, food caterers, cloud kitchens, fine dining restaurants, to bars, they all require a license to operate. The goal of this license is to ensure that the businesses operating in the food and beverage space meet the hygiene standards in the food catering industry.
As part of this process by default, the business will have a Food Safety Management System Plan (FSMS). This FSMS is composed of the following:
a. Company info / FSMS team / product description
b. Flow Diagram with Critical Control Points (CCP) Identified
c. HACCP Charts for CCP
It is up to the business to decide how they want to handle their FSMS plan and what actions they will take for the CCP. Due to the traditional nature of the f&b industry, many of these businesses run everything by hand and paper. Their day to day operations are often recorded in a notebook and at the end of the month, they are digitally transcribed by a member of their organization. The paper records then go on to live in a box in their closet. By doing the paper records the businesses spend massive amounts of paper over time and on average 40 hours a month transcribing them.
Over 40 hours a month are spent by a person digitally transcribing the hand recorded notes for the restaurants FSMS Plan.
Adoption shouldn’t be a problem
One of the biggest problems business owners faces when wanting to digitally transform their kitchen operations come with their personnel’s willingness to learn a new system. Many of our customers have expressed to us that their on-site team refuses to use other systems as they feel they are too complicated. Some have expressed that by adopting other solutions a task that used to take then 30 minutes became 50 minutes. The goal of transforming the kitchen should be to make the team faster not slow them down. Thus, the business has to spend additional time in training their staff on these new solutions. A huge problem in the food industry is its turnover. In 2018 the average turnover rate at a fast food joint reached 150% (Business Insider SG, 2018). That means a restaurant that employe 20 people will have to train 30 people in one year. Think about how much time a business has to spent to ensure that its employees can comply with the food safety, know the restaurant’s SOP, and be able to start working. We can roughly say “time is money for them”.
The average turnover rate at a fast food joint reached 150% in 2018.
Lowering the training time in restaurants
For this reason, the FOX-TECH team developed a solution that could be easily implemented and adopted by a team in one day. Our adoption requirements are simple: You need to know how to plug a USB and have basic commands of a smartphone.
Once we have deployed our solution the customer has immediately added a sensing and intelligence layer to their operations. From day 1 they can receive the following benefits:
- Automating parts of the HACCP Plan (temperature and humidity records, alerts, and more)
- Keep an electronic version of food records
- Quickly generate HACCP compliant documentation for Food Hygiene Officer and Food Safety Auditor
- Detect in-house irregularities relating to food safety and storage
In a year we can save them 2,190 hours which they may have previously spent in parts of their FSMS plan/ HACCP plan.
It’s not just food safety monitoring. It’s about using actionable data.
Granted one of the immediate benefits of our solution comes in the shape of optimizing the food safety of the restaurant. However, through the intelligence layer of our solution, we provide these businesses with key insights on their operations. The goal for us is to provide our customers with actionable data that can be translated into their business CAPEX, operational procedures, and business intelligence. Some actionable data that can be obtained through our platform:
- Pinpoint operation areas which can be optimized to reduce food waste
- Reduce electricity use as a result of understanding the operation’s refrigerator usage.
- Trend analysis of food safety compliance
Through actionable data, these businesses are able to fine-tune their operations and become more efficient and sustainable. At FOX-TECH we are looking to empower traditional businesses to elevate the livelihood of the local economy.
This is part one of the farm, manufacturing, and warehouse series exploring how IoT data analytics can have a positive impact on traditional businesses.
Learn More at the TEMPHAWK www.temphawk.net
Follow our use cases series @ FOX-TECH in the food value chain Publication
References
U.S. Food & Drug Administration recommendations for serving up safe buffets (2018 )https://www.fda.gov/food/buy-store-serve-safe-food/serving-safe-buffets
Business Insider Singapore (2018) https://www.businessinsider.sg/mcdonalds-taco-bell-fast-food-turnover-technology-2018-4
