How to save $12,000+ a year in food wastage
Imagine turning up to work to discover one of your coolrooms – that holds thousands of dollars worth of food – has failed overnight.
You don’t know exactly when it happened, so you can’t determine how long the food has been in the temperature ‘danger zone’. Most likely, you’ll have to throw the whole lot out.
The financial loss is hard enough to take, but then the thought of having to recover that lost food to feed your customers hits you like a bullet to the stomach.
In the food industry, stock losses due to refrigeration breakdowns without temperature monitoring tools can run into the tens of thousands of dollars. They can be caused by a number of factors – many of which are beyond your control.
Refrigeration issues that put your food at risk
We estimate that a typical food business can expect to experience two critical equipment failures per year, at an average stock loss value per equipment failure (revenue) of $6,000 – so a total loss per year of $12,000.
Incidents can and do happen – and the consequences can be catastrophic. So what can cause your food to move out of the safe temperature range? Here are some common culprits:
⚠️ Power failures
⚠️ Condensors icing over
⚠️ Compressors failing
⚠️ Improper loading
⚠️ Door seals failing
⚠️ Doors left open
⚠️ High humidity
⚠️ Poor ventilation
Manual temperature checks: are they enough?
Unfortunately, no. For starters, your business most likely doesn’t operate 24 hours per day, 365 days per year, and yet there’s food being stored on-site all year round. Would you know if there had been a temperature rise since your last manual check?
And even while people are on-site, as with all busy commercial kitchens, the temptation is to focus on the immediate demands of busy periods. So despite the best intentions, temperature checks can be overlooked or worse, ‘completed’ retrospectively (falsification).
The good news is that there’s something quite simple that you can do to protect yourself: install an automated temperature monitoring system across your refrigeration units.
Live temperature monitoring = early detection and prevention
A live, remote temperature monitoring system is just that – remote – which means that it will alert you to an equipment failure day or night, whether you are on or off site. This means you can react quickly and organise someone to relocate your stock before it spoils – from wherever you are.
But it does much more than this – unlike manual temperature checks, a temperature monitoring system can pinpoint problems that could lead to a breakdown. So those issues we outlined above, like door seals or compressors failing, can be detected early – allowing you to prioritise maintenance and prevent a breakdown from occurring in the first place.
With done-for-you reporting and diagnostics, Monika’s software highlights what’s going wrong, when and where. It’s the hard evidence you need to get your refrigeration technicians on board with maintaining – and even replacing – equipment when needed. This reduces equipment running costs (energy consumption), too – as you’ll be able to address problems that cause your equipment to work harder than it needs to.
Want to know more? Check out these blog posts:
- How a university Head Chef saved $30,000 worth of stock when his Monika system identified a problem with one of his walk-in units.
- How to choose the right sensors for live temperature monitoring of your fridges and freezers
Contact us for a free demonstration, where we will show you exactly how a live temperature monitoring system saves operational costs for your business.
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.