Temperature Logging is 3 Times Faster with New Mobile Inspector Release!

This week Mobile Inspector released version 1.4 of the service.  Client's like the new easier to use interface and find it very user-friendly.  The most noticeable improvement came in the form of quicker Temperature Logging, which is now three times faster than the previous release.  

"Our clients told us, and our usage data showed, that our temperature logging was our most beneficial and widely used feature.  It made sense for us to make that feature quicker and easier to use"  said Tommy Yionoulis Mobile Inspector Architect/Product Manager.  

Moving the temperature logging right to the data capture screen, means that you can enter temps right there as you answer questions vs. having to load another page to enter temps.  

 

This release also included other new features:

1.  Quicker resuming of inspections through the "Restart Last Inspection" functionality.

2.  Added new messaging window on inspection pages.

3.  Minor bug fixes

To learn more about how Mobile Inspector can help you simplify your operations record keeping and give corporate managers more insight into daily operations contact us at www.MobileInspector.biz.

Self-Insecting Catches Problem before….

Food Safety News reported that Perdue is recalling a small amount of Chickens because those specific birds got into the temperature danger zone and were shipped to grocery stores in the north east.  

The reason I'm writing this blog is to applaud Perdue for self-inspecting and catching this issue before it became a national story.  Corporate responsibility and common sense dictate that we conduct daily operations inspections to ensure that we are running safe operations. 

Perdue discovered they had a problem and took appropriate action to recall the potentially hazardous birds; that is all we can ask of them.  Mistakes happen, what separates responsible companies from irresponsible companies is what they do when they discover they have a problem.

Our product, Mobile Inspector, is a cloud-based inspection application that facilitates the paperless collection and organization of inspection and checklist data.  To learn more about Mobile Inspector, please check out our website at http://mobileinspector.biz.

One Screw up in One Restaurant can Damage a Brand Overnight

First off I want to say that it is great, according to recent news stories that the woman who drank the lye laced sweet tea at Dickey's BBQ is doing better. 

This blog isn't to condemn Dickey's as an organization.  The owners and managers of the unit in question need to be dealt with because there were some serious management lapses: from hiring to training to storage of chemicals to preparation of food.

The fact is we work in a difficult industry.  The restaurant industry is so dispersed, Subway has over 30,000 locations.  The food that we purchase and cook comes from around the world.  Most importantly a large portion of our workforce are not professionals.  They are young, inexperienced workers who are entrusted with our customer's health and our brand/livelihoods on a daily basis. 

According to Statista.com  in 2014, it is estimated that there will be 13.5 million employees in the restaurant industry.  The US Department of Labor states that more than 21% of these restaurant industry workers were in the age range from 16 to 19 years old, which is five times higher than all other industries.  I'm not stating that the person who poisoned the tea was young, but they were inexperienced and momentarily stupid.  Quite frankly I'm surprised that these events don't happen more often with the amount of restaurants in this country.  

The only way to combat mistakes like what happened at Dickey's is through consistent daily execution and management efficacy.  As manager's, we can't take it for granted that our employees are checking this stuff or even  know better.  We have to combine training with idiot proofing and daily inspections to catch this stuff before someone makes this type of mistake.  

We at Mobile Inspector have a developed a tablet based checklist and inspection platform.  When a company follows our best practice model of daily checklists and temp logs, they run better more consistent operations.   That is a big first step to stopping this stuff before it happens.

To learn more about Mobile Inspector, please go to MobileInspector.biz

FOX News: Yelp helped NYC health officials find hundreds of cases of food borne illness

Attention restaurant managers,  you should read this article from Fox News about a pilot study between the NYC Health Department, Columbia University, and Yelp; where researchers combed through Yelp reviews to identify food borne illness outbreaks.  They were able to identify 468 posts that were consistent with food borne iIllness and only 15 of those cases had been reported to the health department.  The health department used this information to launch 3 investigations into restaurant’s mentioned in the posts.  

 

In the article the researchers said it took a ton of time to conduct the study because they manually went through the posts and followed up with individual posters.  In my opinion this is the wave of the future; we as diners are posting more and more information online to social networking sites that are public and with a technology investment into the process this becomes a simple data mining exercise.  This data could be accessed in real time and used to direct inspections.  It is conceivable in the near future that you could get a Yelp review that contains a keyword the health department is monitoring for and within a few days you are getting an additional health inspection.  This could lead to an increase in fines levied on restaurants.  

 

If these types of programs are put in place restaurants are going to have to invest in systems for inspection record keeping and hold onto those records for longer.  We are already seeing this with our New Jersey Mobile Inspector clients where the first thing that happens when a health inspection begins is they have to produce their line checks and temp logs.  Mobile Inspector keeps all inspections and temp logs online so they are easy to access by restaurant managers.  In the scenario above you could have a health inspector requesting your temp logs for April 4th in the evening because that is when the Yelp review stated that the person got sick.  

It behooves restaurant managers to have an inspection program in place to insure that they are serving safe and delicious food to their patrons.  This type of government monitoring of social media outlets is a perfect example of the 80/20 rule being applied, let the patrons tell you where you should be focusing your health inspections and get 80% of the return for 20% of the effort.  

Here are some trends that we are seeing in the Government Health Inspection realm:

1. Local news is taking a more active role in food safety: in St. Louis a local NBC station did an expose on school cafeteria cleanliness, in Denver the Fox affiliate posts health inspection violations on their websites and frequently does stories on restaurants that fail.  
2. Fines are increasing.  In Denver total restaurant inspection fines levied grew almost 500% from 2008 through 2011 while the total number of inspections a year decreased by 1000 during the same period.  
3. Technology is making it easier for the restaurants and the inspectors to perform their jobs.
4. Health Inspections are one of those things that people want from their government, so there will rarely be a public outcry around tougher food safety inspections and increased restaurant fines.  

For more information on Mobile Inspector please click here, if you have a question for me around restaurant inspections or franchising please send me an email at Tommy@wevogroup.com.

Government Health Inspection Module

We are pleased to announce Mobile Inspector’s Government Health Inspection Module.  If you follow Mobile Inspector, you know that we believe in self inspections; our better practice model touts daily BOH and FOH critical item checklists, monthly full sanitation inspections, followed up by surprise corporate inspections and government health inspections.  We believe this type of checklist and inspection regimen will have the greatest impact on sanitation and operations. 

Part of managing a successful sanitation self-inspection program is looking for parity between a restaurant’s self sanitation inspections, corporate led sanitation inspections, and government health inspections.  You should be looking for the scores to be in the same letter grade.  Having those scores close to each other gives management the confidence that the results from their restaurant and corporate inspectors are inline with what the local government is looking for.  

 

To this end we have just launched our Government Health Inspection module for Mobile Inspector. This module allows restaurants to enter the scores from their government health inspections quickly and easily.  Those scores become visible in the reporting portal just like the other inspections that are conducted at each restaurant.  Having this information available gives corporate management a solid data point to use in providing managerial feedback and can be used to pinpoint locations that need to improve those Government Health Inspection scores.  

 

The Government Health Inspection Module is a free addition to Mobile Inspector and is live today. 

Scaling Food Safety

If you are interested please read a great article named Scaling Food Safety from QSR Magazine April 2014 written by Daniel P Smith.  Here are a couple of excerpts that I took away from this article:

• “As the food system gets smarter at identifying bugs and tracing, there’s the potential for even more food-safety issues to surface,” says Robert Hibbert, who specializes in federal regulations in the food and agricultural industries as a partner in the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and Healthcare practice at Morgan Lewis.
• “[Food safety] needs to be more than items checked off on a list, but something management and rank-and-file staff believe in,” Hibbert says.
• “There needs to be an active food-safety management system and people held accountable to it,” Theno says, suggesting operators use daily logs or third-party audits as measurable metrics.

From a daily operations and brand perspective, food safety and sanitation should be a core concern.  Getting a person(s) sick from lack of due diligence in receiving to unsafe practices in your kitchens could ruin a person’s life and destroy a brand’s reputation in just a few days.  The food service industry has to put food safety at the top of their list.  We at Mobile Inspector support this article and believe that our product can help operators put a daily emphasis on clean restaurants and better operations.

A benefit to self inspecting

I would like to tell you a story that happened to me a few weeks ago. I need to disclose to you that I’m the architect of Mobile Inspector and therefore believe that we offer a better solution than a lot of our competitors. At a lunch meeting recently I was reminded of one huge benefit of self inspections over 3rd party inspections.

My colleague and I were having a lunch meeting in the bar of a mid priced steak restaurant, I’m not going to name the restaurant. To give you an idea of the type of restaurant; our lunch for two with no app’s or cocktails was $53.00 with tip.

The restaurant was slammed and on a wait and we had a very good view of the bar and the line. Our food was taking a little longer than usual to come out, we were at about 20 minutes for a burger and a rare steak salad. This is when I noticed a well dressed young woman in a navy blue hat carrying a very large computer walk right by my table. I couldn’t believe that this 3rd party inspection company was conducting an inspection during a lunch rush, it was 11:55 am. Within a few minutes I noticed the 3rd party Inspector temping food items on the line as cooks were pulling hot items off the grills trying to avoid her.  

I asked my waitress why our meal was taking long and she said that the inspector was causing a slight disruption in the kitchen. In my opinion that inspector showed horrible judgement and a lack of understanding of the restaurant business in general. Everyone knows that you simply don’t call on restaurants from 11 to 1 or 6 to 8.

Restaurant manager’s know lunch has got to be fast, most people don’t have the luxury of a 90 minute lunch. They need to be able to commute, order, eat, and get back to their offices within an hour. My guess is that someone in that restaurant who needed to be back to work within an hour probably didn’t make it if there food took as long as ours.

The lesson is this: self inspections are conducted on your schedule and they yield the same results as 3rd party inspections.

The Story Behind Mobile Inspector

In 2008 I was the RSC Operations Leader at Quiznos, and was tasked with managing the data collection of our Operations Inspection program.  My team and I built an online inspection process that could be accessed on smart phones and created dashboards in Excel.  We were able to present to the executive team an accurate picture of how the restaurants were operating on a daily basis.
In support of the Torpedos Sandwich launch in summer of 2009 we conducted over 3500 restaurant inspections in a 2 week period.  Our entire field team, along with key operations people at corporate, visited every restaurant in the system. It was impressive.  We conducted our normal operations inspection and a specific Torpedo launch inspection that was aimed at insuring the restaurants were ready for the launch.  The Torpedo inspection asked the following types of questions:  had the restaurant received the torpedo bread and could the restaurant teams demonstrate the proper preparation of each sandwich, etc..

Later that year I left Quiznos and with my business partners started WEVO Group.  WEVO Group is a business process management consultancy primarily developing custom applications in the large enterprise space. Seven of our current/recent clients were in the 2013 Fortune 500 with two in the Fortune 25.

Mobile Inspector was conceived in Q4 2012 and we launched an early prototype in January of 2013 with a second prototype coming out in May.  We posted a video on LinkedIn and got immediate attention.  Unfortunately we were looking for a consulting engagement and our potential client was looking for a ready to implement product.  It was at that point that we committed to building a cloud based Mobile Inspector service offering.  We launched Mobile Inspector in February of 2014.

I think what makes Mobile Inspector unique in this space is that the software, the user interface, the functionality, and the licensing model were designed to support our inspection philosophy: Restaurant safety and sanitation as well as outstanding operations are a shift by shift battle and the way to win that battle is through consistent execution.  In support of that goal we recommend that restaurant management conduct:

• Daily BOH Critical Item and FOH Readiness Checklists
• Monthly Full Sanitation/Operations inspections
• Quarterly surprise corporate led Full Sanitation/Operations inspections

At every step of this process we are striving for consistent execution and follow-up that will insure safe and well operating restaurants.

We realize that a restaurant manager’s job is to run a safe and profitable restaurant and we believe that daily checklists and inspections help support that goal.  Our hope is that when you use the product you will experience the intuitive design aspects that were engineered into the solution. You will tell that this product was built by a restaurateur for restaurateurs.

We are 100% committed to making Mobile Inspector and our entire inspection philosophy the better practice in the hospitality industry.  We look forward to hearing from you and ultimately getting Mobile Inspector deployed in your system.  If you would like to contact me directly, please email me at Tommy@wevogroup.com.

By Tommy Yionoulis - MBA, Architect Mobile Inspector and Partner WEVO Group