£15,000 worth of stock saved at Heriot Watt University
August 25th , 2020 by Monika Australia & Asia Pacific
Heriot-Watt University in the UK has been using Monika for more than twenty years, and recently upgraded to MonikaPrime. In May this year, at the height of COVID-19 lockdown and while no staff were on-site, the system identified a problem with the site’s catering store walk-in freezer.
Executive Head Chef Jamie Jack was notified via text message and was able to arrange engineers to attend, where they found both compressors were failing. One had a gas leak and the other had tripped due to increased demand as a result of the leak.
Jamie explained: “The two faults were quickly rectified, saving us not only the headache of having to empty such a large freezer but also saving in the region of £15,000 worth of stock being held in it…Having the Monika system has certainly paid for itself over and over again throughout the years!”
Ensuring food storage temperatures are safe is critical to avoiding food-borne illness and the terrible business consequences that follow. MonikaPrime gives Executive Head Chef Jamie Jack visibility of all refrigerated units across the university campus from a mobile device.
As a cloud-based food safety system, MonikaPrime ticks many boxes when it comes to improving safety and efficiency in a food service environment: a manual temperature recording system will involve staff visiting numerous pieces of equipment and writing down their temperatures several times a day. Not only is this time-consuming and prone to error – but in the current pandemic, it carries a greater risk to staff from coming into contact with surfaces as they repeatedly move around a busy environment.
MonikaPrime’s Equipment Management module monitors unit temperatures continuously by collecting data from sensors installed among the food within a cabinet. The sensors simulate the temperature of the food and trigger alarms when this moves out of safe range. Food can therefore be moved before it spoils and needs to be discarded.
Monika sensors can be set flexibly with wide critical temperature limits for lower-risk foods and narrow limits for higher risk items such as seafood. An alarm escalation system ensures management is made aware of urgent issues not dealt with in the kitchen, and alerts can be received remotely. Monika can also install other sensors e.g. to identify if a door has been left open too long or how a compressor is running to ensure timely maintenance and to save energy.
Contact us for a free demonstration, where we will show you exactly how it can work for you.
Monika has provided digital food and clinical safety solutions to healthcare and foodservice institutions worldwide since the early 1990s. Our product simulation technology originated from research conducted in an accredited laboratory into 100+ different product types.