Digital Tools to Streamline Your Food Processing Safety Processes
Tech solutions for culinary teams of all sizes
Culinary teams face no shortage of challenges when it comes to keeping food safety processes top of mind, but thankfully digital tools can make a world of difference. Whether you’ve already started down the path of a digital transformation for your business, or you’re still exploring the solutions to best support your staff, focusing on digital data can help you build a better foundation for business decisions in the future.
Embracing digital tools, and how they can support your team in creating a food safety culture throughout your whole business, sets up your business for success. From single boutique restauranteurs to global food manufacturers, here are the places your business can benefit most from digital upgrades.
Temperature and Condition Monitoring
Whether it’s a digital thermometer in your ovens or a humidity sensor in your walk-ins and freezers, keeping a running log of your kitchen or facility conditions can support your food safety efforts. Additionally, with automated condition tracking you’ll have better insight into how long your products were out of ideal temperatures or humidity, and where there may be risks for bacterial growth or contamination.
Sanitation and Cleaning Schedules
Setting digital schedules with automated reminders, and using digital forms and checklists for cleaning and inspections means a faster, reliable way to ensure your cleaning standards are met. Sanitation and cleaning are key to every kitchen and food processing facility, as they are directly tied to minimizing foodborne illnesses. Digital tracking can take the guesswork out of cleaning schedules while also better preparing you for health, safety, and sanitation inspections.
Allergen Tracking and Alerts
Investing in a digital system to track major allergens can help kitchen staff and food processing facilities, alike. Whether it’s a means of accurate reporting for labeling, or keeping an updated list of allergens available to your customers, ensuring that everyone understands food allergens and cross-contamination protocols makes a better food experience overall. A digital system that integrates with your POS or sales systems can make it easier for your serving staff to alert kitchen staff to severe allergies in your dining area. Additionally, a digital means of tracking your processing input allergens helps adhere to food safety regulations while keeping all your consumers safe.
Supplier Transparency and Performance
Modern food production relies heavily on global suppliers, but with that comes an increased risk of poor visibility into your ingredients’ origins. Implementing digital traceability systems means you’ll always have access to where your food came from, and keep a close eye on reports of contamination or foodborne illnesses. Additionally, by keeping a digital log of your suppliers’ quality and timeliness, you can make better decisions about which vendors are your best bet to work with in the future.
Training and Maintenance Records
Food safety starts with ensuring your team is properly trained on food handling as well as the machinery they’ll be using. With a digital training platform you can ensure standardized safety training across your entire team, as well as keeping an accessible log of who has completed which trainings. A digital learning system also means you can easily deploy new trainings to your team to ensure everyone is always up to date on safety protocols. When it comes to tracking your equipment maintenance, mobile forms make checks and inspections fast and easy, even on the busiest food production floors.
Reporting and Feedback
From tracking guest experience feedback with digital forms to filing incident reports on mobile devices, digital solutions make it easy to capture details and immediately route completed forms where they need to go. This immediate access not only puts you in better contact with your customers but can also lead to faster investigation and corrective action for safety violations. Having fast, actionable insight into safety pitfalls throughout your facility can help guide more comprehensive solutions and better preventative measures.
As digital tools continue to help support businesses of all sizes and industries, it’s time for your team to start exploring new ways to bring technology into their safety processes.
About GoFormz
GoFormz is a digital forms solution that helps bring your data into a single, actionable place. We believe that every food and beverage management team should be able to fill out their forms on any device, redefining their data capture processes. No matter the size of your business, GoFormz is ready to bring your processes to the digital realm. Complete with an open API and multiple native integrations, you can rest assured that your data is always ready, whenever you need it.
