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The pandemic has caused widespread upheavals throughout the restaurant and foodservice industries, and it isn’t clear when—or if—matters will return to normal.
In California, for example, nearly one-third of restaurants have closed their doors permanently as a direct result of the pandemic. Of those eateries that have managed to remain open, many are experiencing difficulty finding enough employees to run the business efficiently. A lot of experienced foodservice workers have moved on to other fields of employment.
As a result of these trends, restaurants are being forced to make do with significantly fewer employees (and at a higher cost) than were available just a few years ago.
The good news is, there is a solution that can help relieve the persistent labor shortages in the food industry. ComplianceMate food safety technology gives restaurants the tools and resources needed to automate most back-of-house (BOH) processes that traditionally have required significant labor and oversight.
ComplianceMate provides labor-saving benefits that compensate for personnel shortages. These advantages include:
Digitized checklists - Transferring those old paper checklists to a handheld device is a simple but highly effective way to save time. Digitizing your checklists can reduce by 50% the amount of time necessary for managing these laborious tasks. This means employees can spend less time documenting and more time on more profitable responsibilities—an important consideration when you're dealing with a reduced staff.
Automated temperature monitoring - Checking temperatures on food storage units is another one of those necessary tasks that become more burdensome when you have relatively few employees around. Nowadays, it’s becoming increasingly common to automate temperature settings, which removes the need for manual adjustment and monitoring. But that alone isn’t enough.
With ComplianceMate, you also receive immediate alerts—even from a distant location when cooling equipment temperatures go out of spec. The system also allows you to maintain logs that can be analyzed for auditing and maintenance purposes. As a result, your HACCP-related labor expenses can be dramatically reduced.
Cloud storage - Data generated by ComplianceMate is automatically uploaded to a secure cloud environment. This simple feature provides multiple time-saving benefits. By putting food safety and handling data in a single storage system, managers can quickly analyze information associated with different processes in any of their restaurant or store locations.
They can even track data across an entire chain of facilities, for complete performance and operational discrepancies. This data can also be easily archived for years and used for mitigation, audit, maintenance, and further analysis and reporting. Some of the supervisory functions can be handled by fewer people, with the hierarchical view across the organization.
This is especially useful for businesses that operate multiple locations in different regions. There have been instances where chain managers have been able to use ComplianceMate to detect food-storage issues occurring in franchises located on the other side of the country and correct it proactively.
ComplianceMate does not eliminate the need for human personnel. What it does do, however, is enable employees to perform their duties more efficiently and effectively, in half the time. That is the sort of edge your restaurant needs to stay competitive in a tight labor market.
