The coolest hotspot for fried chicken these days is a rapidly expanding, family-run restaurant brand known for its craveable recipes and welcoming atmosphere. Their widely acclaimed food has been featured on The Food Channel, praised in food blogs and major publications from coast to coast, and listed among the best fried chicken restaurants in the U.S. (including sixth on The Daily Meal’s list of America’s 75 Best Fried Chicken Spots).
That success is thanks to the culinary team’s fresh take on the bird. Fried chicken has a long and tasty history behind it, and the team wanted to cook up something fresh and distinctive. “How can we make this more pronounced but also rounded in flavor and just have that umami bomb?” they asked themselves. “That’s what we were really gearing on, so we started playing with cayenne and other components, so they would balance out.”
The restaurant group is also a family affair. The founders and their relatives built a casual eatery offering delicious food, an inviting dining environment, and an array of local craft beers on tap.
No wonder their fried chicken has taken flight. The original central location has been joined by additional stores in Nashville, Memphis, and Birmingham, Alabama, with more locations on the horizon.
However, rapid growth, especially across state lines, creates new challenges for restaurants, which already face an uphill struggle to succeed in a crowded marketplace. How could they ensure their food safety and quality programs would be enforced consistently and rigorously at all locations? Enter ComplianceMate™ by Ladle.
“As we’ve started to expand our business, thanks to the success we’ve seen, we wanted a strong QA and food safety program in place to cover all our bases,” the team shared. “That way we can protect the brand and continue to take advantage of new opportunities.”
ComplianceMate fits that need perfectly: the checklist and temperature monitoring solution can enforce brand standards across an entire network of stores while simultaneously adapting to any specific local requirements. A hierarchical view in the ComplianceMate dashboard enables users to see all locations at a glance and identify alerts on any issues at any given store. In this way, ComplianceMate empowers the team to maintain brand standards universally.
“ComplianceMate helps ease some growing pains,” the team explained. One store can develop idiosyncratic habits that might not take place at other locations. “As a company, we want one playing field, one set of rules and procedures.” That consistency might not seem like such a big deal with only one or two locations, but once there are five or more, it becomes paramount to enforce consistency and protect the brand. ComplianceMate also offers tools that help enforce corporate policies beyond just monitoring food temperatures.
Checklists can be customized and completed from any handheld smart device. As they are completed, the information is uploaded to a secure cloud in real-time so that leadership can make sure procedures are being followed in tandem everywhere. If not—if temperatures go out of spec or a checklist isn’t completed appropriately—automated alerts can notify store managers and company executives.
Strengthening a food safety and quality assurance program is just the start. It’s equally critical that any solution fit into the restaurant’s normal flow.
“When we think about systems, it’s critical to keep them as simple as possible,” the team shared, “because that means they will take off faster and won’t bog down operations. Anything that eases operations makes it easy for people to be successful.”
Prior to ComplianceMate, the group was trying to wrangle endless lists and papers for the food safety program, scheduling multiple rounds of meetings with kitchen managers, and more. The team explained that ComplianceMate’s easy-to-complete checklists and automated alerts ended the previously endless paper chase, even while creating an automatic and easy-to-access paper trail.
For example, anytime a health inspector walks in and wants the temperature log, the team can pull everything up instantly. “If a guest had a foodborne illness potentially linked back to us, we can look at all of our temperature history, and that will eliminate us as a culprit.” Traditional paper records can get lost or be left incomplete. “A lot of factors can put you into a situation you don’t want to be in.” ComplianceMate, however, frees teams from manual temperature checks by using remote, wireless sensors and probes, eliminating the possibility of human error.
“And ComplianceMate acts like your partner,” they said. ComplianceMate will send alerts to any designated contact if a checklist isn’t done by a certain time or if a temperature goes out of spec.
Even if it’s 2 a.m. and the cooler goes out completely, ComplianceMate generates a phone call so a manager or executive can get to the store and fix the problem before losing product and wasting money.
The system also generates a checklist completion report at the end of each week, so users can see any anomalies. That creates opportunities for further coaching and ensures all systems are working the way they should.
“ComplianceMate support has been phenomenal,” the team added, citing quick responsiveness to questions, comments, and issues as an indicator of the strength of the partnership. “It’s great to be able to just reach out and get requests answered quickly.”
