 Food safety is a moving target. In addition to the growing list of guest dietary requirements foodservice businesses monitor, even changes in staff and shifts can leave room for an oversight that creates a problem. The stakes are especially high in senior living facilities, where weakened immune systems and health challenges leave people more vulnerable.
Fortunately, a wide array of technology is being used to monitor safety in foodservice businesses – wireless sensors for remote monitoring, Bluetooth thermometers, and smart dishwashing machines that automatically log sanitation temperatures and chemical levels are just a few examples. These tools are useful in removing error-prone manual processes and human biases, but they aren’t immune to failure, or a replacement for human knowledge. Yet it’s easy for technology to become a crutch during busy or understaffed shifts. Taking a few steps can help you strike the right balance between tech-driven accuracy and human oversight. Starting small – say, by automating a single critical control point like cold storage monitoring before expanding to other areas – can help your team adapt to a new tool and pick up on potential issues with it. Of course, ongoing staff training on tech additions is needed to maximize their benefits and maintain compliance. Finally, scheduling periodic reviews of digital records can ensure you’re verifying the accuracy of the tools you implement so you can address any discrepancies promptly.  Some facets of food safety can’t be delegated to machines — equipment still needs to be cleaned, technology can malfunction, and staff need to understand how they can manually manage and protect food safety and quality in your operation. However, at a time when foodservice businesses need to use all of the staff they have available without cutting corners on key tasks, automation (supported through a kitchen’s interconnected sensors) can be critical in streamlining tasks and reducing costs. As a recent report from Modern Restaurant Management explains, these benefits are evident in restaurants using digitized logbooks and food monitoring systems. In real time, they can alert staff to early warning signs that a food safety issue is present, then trigger automated actions in response. Such tools can also ensure that potential food safety risks are caught after hours when no one is on your premises — a helpful benefit when severe weather is becoming a more frequent threat in many parts of the country.
 Have you digitized your food safety management yet? The benefits of doing so become especially clear when you’re operating multiple stores. You can run your food safety program from a centralized system that applies procedures and training consistently across the different operations. In addition to helping you pinpoint and respond to hazards quickly, a centralized system ensures your guests have a consistent experience with your brand regardless of where they encounter it — a major bonus if your guests can currently taste differences in the food served at your various locations. It enables real-time data analysis and response across all operations, so an error you detect in one store is one you can quickly prevent in another. This automatically feeds into comprehensive reports that you can analyze across stores. You will more readily spot outliers that may need attention — something that also casts your brand in a favorable light with regulators when it comes to compliance.
If your restaurant experiences a failure in its food safety compliance, where is the weak point that allowed it to occur? For many restaurants, it comes down to the knowledge of the front-line manager. In a high-turnover industry, that front-line manager may be new to the restaurant business, inexperienced in the area they have to oversee, and expected to take on responsibilities before they fully understand what they require. Unfortunately, that leaves your restaurant more vulnerable to costly problems. So where are your biggest risks? How much do you have to rely on your staff to interpret laws and make changes on the fly? How much are you simply hoping for the best? The training and tools you use should be able to help carry a lot of that weight – and they should be able to evolve easily in step with the changes in the surrounding restaurant landscape. Do yours?  Digital tools and other systems that enable kitchen automation may at first sound like items suited to deep-pocketed, well-resourced restaurants, but they can help any restaurant save potentially significant money in the long term – by minimizing the labor hours required for tasks and preventing unsafe food from reaching guests. One simple example: Bluetooth thermometers that take food temperatures and then automatically add the results to a digital HACCP log. This removes a time-consuming, error-prone manual process from the to-do list, gives you a ready-made record to present during inspections, and provides a means of prompting staff when temperatures approach the danger zone. The thermometers can alert staff to the problem so they can take immediate steps to ensure the food isn’t served to guests.
 Even if your business has a strong food safety record and culture, the rapid turnover of a workforce can chip away at it if you don’t take action to protect it. A report from Food Safety Magazine encourages businesses to rise to the challenge in four steps using the acronym SAVE: Standardize your processes across your locations and production zones. Automate processes where possible in an effort to simplify your training and compliance procedures. Validate the effectiveness of hygiene protocols and compliance using tools that can keep you on track. Finally, educate people across your organization about the “why” of food safety – it helps people retain both the training material and your expectations of them when it comes to protecting the business.
 A visit from a health and safety inspector can cause anxiety in a restaurant, but it doesn’t have to. Spreading the responsibility for food safety across your team can help everyone gain the confidence they need to present your facility well. At a time when turnover remains high and resources are stretched, weaving automated learning tools into the fabric of everyday tasks can help. First identify your basic needs when it comes to training so you can gather resources that address past problems and new processes. While every employee should be given high-level training, follow-up training should be continuous and built into the flow of work, with checklists and mini lessons accessed via mobile device so they accompany the employee and be updated in real time.
 As restaurants use automation in an effort to tackle labor challenges, they are also aiming to get a better handle on food safety challenges, consistency issues and consumer preferences. For example, Panera has been using the CookRight Coffee system from Miso Robotics to power their popular coffee subscription program. The system uses artificial intelligence to monitor coffee volume and temperature, which allows the brand to free up staff for other tasks. But beyond that, the technology also provides predictive analytics to inform the restaurant of what kinds of coffee customers are ordering and when – so it can then provide (and promote) the options that are bringing customers into the restaurant under various conditions.
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