6 ways a digital food safety and hygiene system saves you money in your food operations.
January 28th , 2022 by Monika Australia & Asia Pacific
It isn’t hard to imagine how much easier life could be without the daily burden of manual food safety records. However, ease and convenience alone usually aren’t enough to justify the financial outlay of digital food safety and hygiene system.
The good news is, going digital with your food safety processes isn’t just about making people’s lives easier, or even about improving safety and compliance (although for some businesses, this can be the driving factor). It saves quantifiable time and money.
The amount you save will depend on several factors, such as how you currently do things, your level of risk tolerance, and the size of your operation. But overall, there are six key operational areas where a digital food safety system can reduce or eliminate costs.
We outline the savings that you could make below, assuming your organisation runs a ‘typical’ mid-sized foodservice operation with about 3-5 full-time kitchen operations staff across 1-3 sites.
1. Stock loss
The most substantial saving to be made from having a digital food safety and hygiene system is through stock loss prevention. In our experience working with hundreds of clients, a typical food operation can expect to experience two critical equipment failures per year. This equates to a total expected annual revenue loss of $24,000 due to food that has either perished or been thrown out due to inadequate food safety records.
With a digital system like MonikaPrime, real-time alerts mean that you can act fast to save your stock before it spoils. Retrospective data also removes any doubt about the safety of your stock after an equipment malfunction or power outage. This means a stock that’s safe to eat won’t be thrown out unnecessarily.
2. Printing, archiving and storage
With digital food safety and hygiene system, you eliminate all printing, archiving and storage costs associated with manual food safety records, which equates to a saving of around $2,000 per year. This includes paper, printing, external warehousing and/or local server and data storage costs (if you are converting paper records to digital format). This doesn’t include labour costs associated with keeping and maintaining these records, which is covered below.
3. Equipment performance and maintenance
How confident are you that your refrigeration equipment is always performing optimally? A MonikaPrime system will analyse the behaviour and performance of a wide range of equipment in your kitchen, including duty cycles, heating and cooling curves, and usage cycles.
This can help you identify equipment that is failing or operating inefficiently, which means you can prioritise maintenance or upgrades in a timely manner. Such early-intervention maintenance reduces energy consumption and extends the life of your equipment. It can also mean less staff time spent responding to equipment malfunctions and breakdowns.
4. Labour and administration
With no pen and paper recording, a digital food safety system speeds up food production and drastically reduces admin time for kitchen staff. Manual temperature checks of food in storage are all but eliminated, and staff don’t have to stop work during food production to remove gloves, find a pen and write down a temperature.
We estimate the cost per person, per year to maintain compliance under a manual system to be around $1,200. This is based on average time consumption of one hour per person per week and adds up to between $3,600 and $6,000 depending on the number of staff involved.
5. Compliance management and reporting
Food safety and quality managers also have their fair share of administrative duties under a manual, paper-based system. With a digital system, everything is digitally recorded in real-time and stored in the cloud, which means no more collating, filing/archiving, and retrieval of paper records. Travel between sites to access and review records is also reduced, as is time spent following up on incomplete paperwork.
With access to an online suite of reporting tools and data at your fingertips, you are always audit-ready and on top of your compliance requirements – not forever chasing a paper trail.
6. Incident management and response
The biggest potential financial loss of all to any food business due to food safety is the most difficult to quantify: the loss of income and legal costs associated with a food safety incident. Even though fines can run into tens of thousands of dollars, they are insignificant when you consider the long-term financial impacts of closures and lost clientele due to reputational damage.
On the other side, with digital food safety and hygiene system, not only do you have a strong insurance policy against such catastrophic damage, but you also ensure your business is making an environmental contribution through reduced food waste, paper/printing, and energy consumption. This alone makes MonikaPrime a fundamental piece of equipment to running a sustainable, long-term food operation.
Estimated ROI of a digital food safety & hygiene system
So how does all of this translate into a return on investment for your organisation? Based on the areas that we’ve quantified above (noting that not all are quantifiable), a typical food operation can expect to save around $28,000 per annum in food waste, paper/printing/storage, and labour/administration costs. This means that your system will have more than paid for itself within three years and, in that time, delivered a total return on your investment of 24%.
Would you like to understand exactly how MonikaPrime can save money in YOUR business? We can help by undertaking a free cost-benefit analysis tailored to your operations. Contact us for a free demonstration, where we will show you exactly how it can work for you.
Monika has provided temperature monitoring 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.