3 Reasons Your Restaurant Needs Bluetooth Now
Running a restaurant means balancing various different types of risk—the risk of running out of inventory vs. the risk of buying too much inventory; the risk of understaffing vs. the risk of being overstaffed and payroll being too high. And then there are the legal risks—getting sued by someone who got sick or being shut down by your friendly local health inspector for not being fully compliant with FDA regulatory requirements. While the likelihood of legal jeopardy might seem more remote, the catastrophic impact of an outbreak of illness or of being shut down for food safety violations warrants serious steps to mitigate those risks.
1. The Best Health Inspector Insurance You Can Buy
Bluetooth thermometers are quite literally the best insurance you can buy against illness outbreaks or health inspector closure. Why? Because history has proven that human beings are just terrible at recording temperatures on paper logs. The dishwasher test strips are there, but people forget to use them or get tired and don’t bother. The line check log is there but the temptation to fill in the temperatures all at once from the imagination is too great—even if you do actually check the temperatures to make sure everything is still safe.
For just a few more dollars, your thermometers can send their readings directly to a digital log—every time, every day, day in and day out. They don’t get tired or grumpy or lazy. They just do what you program them to do. And a digital log CANNOT be falsified, even if you wanted to, but you don’t need to want to because it’s just so easy to have them automatically recorded. The coolness factor of high tech is even an additional incentive for your workers to use the thermometers as intended.
Now imagine the health inspector showing up for a surprise visit and instead of scrambling to find a folder full of half-completed paper logs (with fictional temperatures scattered on them), you open up your electronic log full of unfalsifiable auto-recorded food safety temps and say to the health inspector something like, “Which month would you like?” or just “Knock yourself out…”
The mere fact that you use cutting-edge Bluetooth thermometry (as is called for in the FDA’s own New Era of Food Safety Blueprint released earlier this year) is one of the strongest signals you can send to the Health Inspector that you take food safety nearly as seriously as the Health Department does.
Get the legal-risk insurance by investing in Bluetooth-enabled thermometers today.
2. Automation Saves You Money
Add to that the fact that you’ll actually be SAVING money. Wait… How do you SAVE money by buying a more expensive Bluetooth-enabled thermometer?
Well, stop and think about how much time it takes for your employees to do a standard line check…
- Set down the pen and clipboard and pick up the thermometer
- Position the probe in the TCS food to be checked
- Wait for the reading
- Set down the thermometer and pick up the pen and clipboard
- Write down the current temperature
- Repeat for each item in the line check
How long do your link checks take? How many line checks do you perform each day in your operation? Three? More?
Now imagine that same employee with a Bluetooth-enabled thermometer…
- Position the probe in the TCS food to be checked
- Press the button on the thermometer
- Repeat for each item in the line check
Lickety-quick. Half an hour savings. Now multiple that half hour by three. Next annualize an hour and a half per day time savings—525 hours per year give or take? At $10 per hour that’s $5,250 dollars. You get the point.
Bluetooth-enabled thermometers pay for themselves in time and efficiency. Just ask anyone who has ever bought a Bluetooth-enabled thermometer or check out the reviews yourself.
And those savings don’t even take into account the cost benefits of avoiding the financial costs of the foodborne illness outbreak and/or health inspector closure of your facility, including…
- Lawsuits and legal fees
- Increased insurance premiums
- Loss of customers and sales
- Negative media exposure and loss of brand reputation
- Lowered staff morale
3. Bluetooth Thermometers Lead to Real Solutions in Real-Time
Not sure if you’ve noticed but paper logs are not interactive. They don’t talk back. One of your employees can write “52°F” next to “Sour Cream” on a paper log just as easily as they can write “38°F” next to “Sour Cream” and nothing will happen.
But that employee’s world changes with a Bluetooth-enabled thermometer in his or her hands. “52°F” brings up a big red “X” (not like the big green check mark that “38°F” gets). And the employee is prompted to take remedial action—right then and there—and record the action they took: Did they…
- “Put the sour cream back in the fridge” to bring it back to a food-safe temperature?
- “Throw the sour cream away” and replace it with fresh sour cream?
- “Notify a manager”?
You decide what the options will be but the system you put in place requires a response. “Going Bluetooth” means defining acceptable ranges for all TCS foods and then taking responsibility for any temperatures that don’t fall within those acceptable ranges, so they don’t become a liability to your organization. Which is what line checks are supposed to accomplish in the first place, right?
It’s time to embrace paperless temperature monitoring in your restaurant. It’s time to step up to Bluetooth.
Bonus Round: WiFi Data Loggers FTW
Bluetooth and WiFi are not the same technology, but they do similar things—they send critical temperatures automatically over the airwaves to other digital devices. When it comes to the tens of thousands of dollars worth of food inventory that you keep in your walk-in fridges and freezers, the critical temperature you need sent over the airwaves is the one alerting you over the weekend that the cooling unit just failed, and your food is about to spoil.
A Data Logger is just a thermometer that continuously “logs” the current temperature at preset intervals (say every 10 minutes) until you tell it to stop. It takes minutes to set up a WiFi-Enabled Data Logger in each of your walk-ins and to enter your own cell phone number for SMS texts and those of the rest of the members of your management team. What that buys you is the peace of mind that if anything does go wrong, you’ll be the first to know—which could literally save you tens of thousands of dollars and major operational disruptions.
ThermoWorks: The Leader in Bluetooth, WiFi-Enabled Thermometers and Data Loggers, and Tracking Systems
When it comes to Bluetooth- and WiFi-enabled thermometers or data loggers, no other company comes close. We have a full suite of eight Bluetooth-enabled thermometers to choose from and several different configurations of WiFi-enabled data loggers.
Download our industry-leading free HACCP LE app (for iOS or Android) and build prompts and high and low alerts for everything in your line check, receiving, or food storage plans. Track all devices and data from all locations in a ThermoWorks Cloud account—from fridge and freezer temperatures to cook-chill verification, line check, and dishwasher sanitization—all with the speed, efficiency, and cost-effectiveness of Bluetooth and WiFi, and all coupled with the accuracy and build-quality of ThermoWorks.
Whatever your need is, we’re sure that ThermoWorks can make a positive impact in your business.
To see how we can help you with your specific needs, call or email our Commercial Sales team: sales@thermoworks.com or call toll free at 1-800-393-6434.
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Check out ThermoWorks Cloud, and download the ThermoWorks app for iOS or Android, for free. Also, check out our other food safety software
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