AI and IoT are Revolutionizing Food Safety in the Restaurant Industry. Here’s How to Take Advantage

Article By Fredd Whipp
Article Source: AI and IoT are Revolutionizing Food Safety in the Restaurant Industry. Here's How to Take Advantage - FSR magazine

Maintaining food safety and quality is always of the utmost importance for those in the food service industry. Whether it’s evolving menus, ingredient tracking or supply chain management, lack of proper food safety management can expose companies to increased risks, decrease customer satisfaction and ultimately hurt business performance. With continuous advancements in digital technology, such as artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT) and process management applications, food service companies can capitalize on these to remove outdated, manual processes and improve operational efficiency while ensuring regulatory compliance every step of the way.

So, how can one improve catering compliance, while minimizing risks of food safety and quality (FSQ)? Let’s dive in.

Breaking Down the Shift Toward Digital Food Safety Management

With the FDA welcoming the new digital era of food safety, leveraging technologies and digitized tools is a no-brainer for cutting costs, streamlining workflows and providing real-time data on food safety management. For example, by implementing IoT sensors, which can measure environmental inputs such as movement or temperature, food service companies can access real-time status of machinery like refrigerators. Integrated with a process management application, the sensors not only capture any change in temperature immediately, but also alert appropriate team members to trigger a response that can preserve merchandise and ensure repairs are made in a timely manner. Without this technology, companies run the risk of being reactive, relying on employees or customers to encounter an issue and report it rather than proactively addressing something before it becomes a bigger issue. 

Companies engaging in outdated ways of food service management processes lose valuable products, decrease employee productivity or customer satisfaction and delay repairs. Moreover, these technological advancements  offer a meticulousness that was previously unavailable, removing manual processes, mitigating the risk of potential human errors, and proactively identifying potential issues and automating workflows to course correct. 

Catering to a Successful Audit 

Integrating technologies such as AI and IoT with a process management app can enhance your compliance management practices to help your business consistently audit for compliance and regulatory requirements, saving time, resources and money. Through a digitized approach, businesses remove the risks of human error when running compliance checks. In addition, process management software can help audit for compliance as operations are completed, ensuring real-time corrections are implemented and standards are maintained at all times. This streamlined and automated approach to compliance management, particularly in FSQ, keeps teams more productive, communicative and effective, while also protecting the health and safety of both employees and customers. 

FSQ Has Gone Digital

The importance of conducting regular compliance checks cannot be overstated. A single missed inspection could have severe consequences for the health of valued customers and thus damage the overall success of the business. Manual monitoring techniques for compliance checks create long testing cycles, limited quantitative accuracy and poor reproducibility. Additionally, manual checks on logbooks do not guarantee highest standards of food quality, and take much more time.

With advanced and easily accessible process management apps solely created to mitigate such risks, these systems notify users of updates in real-time, flagging conflict before it even arises. Not only do these types of systems enhance operational efficiency, but they also streamline compliance processes with second-by-second data tracking and seamless audits, going hand-in-hand with comprehensive tracking. These digital tools ensure that businesses are consistently meeting regulatory standards, allowing restaurants to focus on growth priorities and strategy.

Solutions Where Everybody Wins

In addition to improving real-time alerts and input data, incorporating  sensor-driven process management systems can better streamline restaurant operations, slimming costs, conserving resources and energy, and flagging any issues in real-time. And this is just the beginning. Intelligent software leverages IoT sensor data for optimized efficiency and accessibility – something that has never been available with the typical clipboard and pen. 

By harnessing the power of IoT data integrations with smart monitoring technologies, food service organizations can seamlessly monitor a variety of critical control points including thermal processing in refrigerators, freezers and food storage areas via IoT-enabled sensors; food inventory levels, expiration dates and usage patterns via IoT-based inventory management systems; and equipment performance and usage including fryers, ovens and, dishwashers via IoT sensors. 

Yes, capitalizing on data accuracy enhances food safety operations, but it also optimizes efficiency and resource allocation, thus leading to cost savings, and, of course, a happy consumer experience.

In closing, the digital future of food safety is exciting with new ventures underway (take an AI-based pathogen sensor, for example). Innovative systems are constantly being developed to better empower food suppliers and restaurant management to streamline these processes and ultimately be on the same page, with the same goals in mind. Soon after implementing a sensor-driven process management system into your business, you’ll quickly notice a world of possibilities with access to measurable results and data; elevating your food safety protocols to top-tier standards, and pushing the boundaries of success for food service in this fantastic digital era.