Updated on: February 9, 2025
Food safety mistakes are your worst nightmare if you are in the food industry. Employees are always busy, and a forgotten handwashing, improperly stored meat, or a missed line check can start a foodborne illness incident that could damage your brand. With one in six Americans becoming ill every year from foodborne illnesses and two-thirds of outbreaks originating in restaurants, it’s critical to the well-being of your customers and business to take food safety compliance seriously.
Luckily, enhanced food safety tech has become a staple in the food processing supply chain. The industry uses supply chain management software, whether IoT devices, artificial intelligence, or blockchain, to track food quality and safety throughout the food production process. Food traceability starts with food manufacturers and continues throughout the supply chain.
While they track it throughout the food supply chain, the staff must follow safety regulations and ensure public health once food reaches a restaurant. Training your staff on what quality control should look like is key.
Since food safety education is always on our minds, we covered some technologies that help restaurant employees maintain safe food storage, preparation, and service. These innovative solutions are key to food safety assurance and can help ensure your food products maintain long shelf lives, saving you money in the long run.
- Automated Monitoring
Sensors in coolers, freezers, or other food storage areas have quickly become necessary for many businesses. Real-time monitoring is now the standard. Food safety technology, such as wireless sensors that alert you whenever the temperature rises above safe holding temperatures, allows you to quickly address the problem without throwing out a freezer full of food. Smart packaging has also grown in popularity, which allows you to track food quality and know exactly when food is no longer safe. Continuous monitoring using smart sensors helps ensure food is stored safely in a way manual checks can’t. Monitoring is key to both ensuring compliance and maintaining product quality. Consumer trust skyrockets when potential risks are mitigated, and they can taste the food quality. Add something in here about how we have partners that can help with this, and link to our partner page. - Elearning
While it’s easy to think about food safety technology in terms of devices or solutions that directly monitor food or sterilize surfaces, training in effective food safety techniques can be just as important. With the rise of elearning techniques such as microlearning, you can give employees bite-sized reminders of what they should do keep people safe. Because microlearning is so quick and easy to deliver, employees only have to take a minute to get food safety refreshers.
- Inspection Apps
Complying with internal and external audits can be stressful, but it doesn’t have to be filled with dread. One of the easiest ways to do this is to move audits from spreadsheets to a platform designed to help you carry out and track food safety practices. Food safety technologies, food safety software, or cloud-based apps, can help you with things like automatic HACCP logs, preventing employee fraud, recommending corrective actions and more.
- Labeling
Consistent, clear labeling for prepared foods is an important part of preventing foodborne illnesses. Restaurants using a commissary or fresh-prepared offerings can benefit from automated labeling to comply with government standards. Automated food labeling, especially when incorporated with a full restaurant management solution, takes a huge burden off kitchen staff.
- Light-based decontamination
Food safety technologies that use lights for food safety are becoming more developed for commercial use. New UV processes may be available not only to restaurants but also within the supply chain. They can be a cost-effective way of decontaminating food surfaces or clear liquids.
Avoid the cost and reputation damage of a foodborne illness outbreak. Incidents can not only turn into bad reviews and lost business, but fines and legal fees are also possible, depending on the circumstances. Food safety is stressful, but you now have many tools to help.
Our food safety software lets you easily record food temperatures, get notified to take corrective actions, set cleaning and maintenance schedules, and require manager sign-offs. You can also easily set delivery temperatures, monitor suppliers, and get equipment failure alerts in one simple app. Need reminders to check food temperatures? Our software does that too. With the advancements in food safety software, tracking trends and keeping tabs is easy.
Food safety is critical, but it is not the only aspect of running a successful restaurant. We have innovative restaurant operations software to help you with every facet of your business. When in doubt, automate it to avoid errors. That’s where we can help. Let’s get started today and make your restaurant what you want it to be.
