Food Safety is Broken, Here’s Why

Food safety programs are broken. They are largely paper based, and lag behind technological innovations realized through wireless sensors and digital checklists. Every year, roughly 1 in 6 people (or 48 million people) get sick, 128,000 are hospitalized, and 3,000 die of foodborne diseases. Many of these incidents are easily preventable, but companies who lack a modern food safety solution are not doing all they can to stop these issues from reaching their customers.

This post will explore the 5 biggest reasons why food safety programs are broken, and why digital solutions can make all the difference in maintaining food quality.

1. People Hate Paper Checklists

Currently, paper processes dominate how companies gather food safety information, and require an unnecessary amount of manual work to complete scheduled tasks. Paper based processes provide little visibility into compliance, and are difficult to manage.

For example, McDonald’s has over 100 pages of paper checklists that must be completed every month, by every restaurant. As the management saying goes, “You can only expect what you can inspect.” The problem is that paper is difficult to inspect, and therefore food safety visibility across the industry is next to zero. Adopting a digital food safety solution provides visibility into compliance management, and helps to improve worker productivity.

2. Manual Processes

People hate doing manual inspections, especially when technology can automate the task for them. In today’s food safety practices, valuable employee time is spent (wasted) walking around to inspect equipment and refrigeration performance. With an average of 2 temperature checks a day, a typical restaurant spends 45 minutes of employee time every day on manual processes that can largely be automated by wireless sensors and enhanced by digital checklists which replace paper checklists.

3. Reactive vs Proactive

Today’s food safety practices are optimized for reacting to incidents, not proactively identifying risk factors. In a reactionary environment, paper checklists are inspected well after events have taken place. This leads to uncontrolled risk, which we will expand on in the next section.

4. Uncontrolled Brand Risk

Today, companies are inviting enormous brand risk into their business because they are not taking a proactive approach to food safety. Your reputation is everything, in life and in business. As Warren Buffet says, “it takes 20 years to build a good reputation, and five minutes to destroy it.” The proportion of company value associated with their brand, currently averaging 80%, is at an all time high, making food safety incident management more important than ever. Food safety incidents create a media frenzy, and can have a major impact on revenue growth. To proactively manage this risk, restaurants need to identify risk factors and risk-stratify their restaurants in real-time. Think about an alarm monitoring company; if a smoke detector senses a fire, they identify the risk in real-time and respond. Restaurants need to monitor their fridges with sensors and identify risk in real-time if food is being ruined by improper fridge temperatures.

5. From Analog to Digital 

Across the food service industry there is a growing movement in adoption of digital food safety solutions. By using wireless sensors that report temperature in real-time, companies identify failing equipment before a food safety incident occurs. According to the CDC, 90% food safety incidents originate from improper temperature management. While inexpensive internet connected sensors are transforming equipment monitoring, digital checklists on tablets and phones are transforming paper checklists. These digital checklists bring visibility to the hundreds of paper checklists that currently keep restaurant managers in the dark. Digital checklists are also reducing the amount of time needed to complete checklists by up to 60% – improving productivity while ensuring product quality.

Food safety incidents are far easier to prevent than they are to fix after they have occurred. Today’s paper-based processes and manual temperature checks present an immediate opportunity for food service operators to prove their food safety practices. As companies move to digital food safety, SmartSense have helped automate real-time temperature monitoring at over 40,000 sites around the world.  By moving to digital food safety and eliminating paper checklists, restaurants are taking proactive control of their food safety, and bringing peace of mind to their customers – this is good for everybody.

Join us on twitter at #ILoveFoodSafety. Let’s fix food safety!

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