According to a CDC report, every year, around 48 million people get sick from a food-borne disease in the United States, from which 128,000 are hospitalized and almost 3,000 people die. The most common food-borne disease agent is the Norovirus which accounts for almost 40% of all outbreaks. When a food related incident happens in one branch of a franchise chain, not only that unit will be penalized by health authorities, but also the entire brand will bear severe losses due to loosing customer confidence. Up until now, no technological solution has been introduced to allow the headquarters to monitor hygiene compliance among their franchise units.
One of the main concerns regarding food hygiene in restaurants and any food processing center is to ensure that the temperature of the appliances and food containers stays at the recommended level (defined by Department of Health). Currently these data is being logged and recorded manually by the staff of the food processing organization. However, this is not only subject to human error but it is also difficult for high level managers to supervise the process. Accordingly, there is a need for a centralized monitoring and control system to log this data and provide a real-time warning in case a temperature falls beyond the acceptable range.
Another source of concern regarding food safety is the hygiene among the staff of the restaurants. For example, there are hand-washing codes dictated by the health organization that the staff should follow. In addition, the staff should not attend the work space if they are ill and have a fever. Unfortunately, at the moment there is no automatic mechanism to monitor staff compliance with these codes without violating their privacy. Restaurants currently rely on the honesty of the staff to report them.
Moreover, the environment temperature and humidity shall be controlled in a restaurant kitchen to make sure that the environment is not suitable for growth of bacteria and fungus.
Furthermore, another issue regarding food safety is the proper labeling of the opened cans and raw meat in the refrigerator. That's because the expiration time of a food product will change whenever the can or container is opened. On the other hand, the raw material or meat may not be used all at once upon opening of the container and the left over may be kept in the refrigerator for future use by another employee. Since this employee may not be the one who originally opened the container, it may be hard for he or she to determine how old the can ingredient is. At the moment, there are certain procedures in place for manual food labeling by the staff, but they may forget to label the opened cans. This can happen due to work pressure, stress or even confusion on calculating the expiration date based on the type of ingredient.
This patent application will address all these issues separately and provide hygiene monitoring sub-systems that can be used by managers to get real-time feedback about the level of compliance with food safety codes in each remote franchise unit. Needless to say, that each sub-system may be implemented individually or in combination to other sub-system to provide cost effective solution based on customer requirements.
Our combined system can help managers of chain restaurants and grocery super-stores to remotely monitor the level of hygiene compliance among the franchise units; promote a good reputation among their patrons; reduce the risk of contamination, fines, and lawsuits; get real time feedback that allows immediate correction; reduce maintenance costs by identifying the need for service sooner; and reduce the insurance premium related to “accidental contamination” clause by proving the business is highly monitored.