September is food safety month, is your restaurant in compliance? With recent outbreaks of E-coli, listeria, and other foodborne illnesses it is crucial that you keep your facility at the top of mind when it comes to processes and awareness. According to the CDC the number one cause of foodborne illness is norovirus. This virus along with other pathogens causes 9.4 million illness each year, just in the United States. IoT is not just a buzzword anymore, as a restaurateur you are bombarded with hundreds of different pos cloud software, table kiosk solutions, and on-demand delivery technology companies. But what about your food safety? With more than 6.4 billion “things” connected today, the visibility into your food and food safety procedures that IoT can provide you with is priceless.
As an energy management company, our initial goal was to help restaurateurs save money, cut their energy consumption where they needed it most because it was good for them and good for the environment. We then started to hear a specific request from our customers, FOOD SAFETY! They were yelling it at the top of their lungs begging for an easy solution to fit their need; thus was born the chameleon™ food safety through temperature monitoring, system. We wanted to add onto our platform something that would satisfy the call of our customers cries for help, while still saving them money through energy management. Visibility and reporting was our key focus here and that’s something that our system does flawlessly.
Visibility into what your walk-in and reach in coolers are doing is invaluable. According to the centers for disease control and prevention research, between the years of 1998 and 2008, improper holding of food was the biggest risk factor for foodborne illness outbreaks. During that time the CDC linked 504 restaurant outbreaks to improperly cooled foods. That being said, do you know what your walk-in temperatures are right now? chameleon provides our customers with real-time and retrospective data at the click of a button. Take a look at the screenshot of our chameleon app below, you can see that the walk-in unit being monitored is not reaching the current temperature, that powerful data combined with our client success managers, we can help you uncover the real problem.
The second graph is recording temperature data from reach-in coolers or food prep areas. The sensors we use are small and wireless so that you never have to worry about wires getting in the way of your equipment or being an eyesore. These deck of cards sized temperature sensors record temperature data from any space and reports it back to our hub every minute. This accuracy helps ensure you have the most accurate temperatures at any given moment.
This type of powerful information is something that dozens of brands are taking advantage of already. You may know what your walk-ins and reach-ins are set to but are they actually hitting, and more importantly, maintaining that temperature? chameleon takes pride in helping our customers achieve the most exceptional in food safety standards by creating custom reporting, alerting at any temperature abnormalities, and even providing retrospective data and reports of your facilities food safety temperatures.