The longer you use paper, the higher your risk of noncompliance; discover the benefits of paperless food safety.
The longer you use paper, the higher your risk of noncompliance; discover the benefits of paperless food safety.
Every single week, tens of food service and production companies come to us trying to understand if they need to digitize their food safety system or what the process entails.
Whether we’re talking to Food Safety and Quality Managers to Facility Supervisors or Directors of Operations, the underlying goal of and motivation for looking at food safety management software is the same: to increase operational efficiency and grow their business.
Switching from a paper-based food safety system to a digital one is not a question of if, but when. If the goal is growth, managing food safety with pen and paper will eventually hinder your company's growth. So why not take control of the transition instead of getting caught reacting to it?
Like most businesses in the food industry, especially in today’s economy, you’re concerned with:
If you’re on the fence about digitizing your food safety, here are the major reasons why you need to start prioritizing food safety digitization today.
You’ll also hear from FoodDocs customers who have addressed the five concerns we highlight below:
Key takeaways: Today’s food safety software is more user-friendly and accessible than ever – and it quickly pays for itself. Many kitchens recoup their investment in a digital FSMS in under 12 months through saved labor, reduced waste, and prevented compliance issues, according to Chomp.
A “pen-and-paper” system isn’t really free. Food Safety Managers and Quality Assurance Managers have an average hourly rate of $46.40 in the U.S. They spend an average of 3 to 4 hours per week just managing paper-based safety logs, translating to about $7,238.40 to $9,651.20 in annual labor wasted per location. So yes, paper-based systems carry costly inefficiencies and risk.
"Often, food service owners tell me that they can’t afford the investment, or that they’re overwhelmed about how to find and implement the right system," said Francine L. Shaw, Food Safety Specialist, Co-Host of Don’t Eat Poop! Podcast, and Founder and CEO of Savvy Food Safety, Inc. "I reassure them that it’s truly easier than ever to incorporate tech tools into food companies, and it’s one of the smartest things companies can do."
Food safety management tasks that used to take Ruth 120 minutes per day only take 10 minutes, which she first shared in the Captain Grappo case study.
Now I can sit down and it's just all there in one place. It takes me 5-10 minutes. Whereas before, I had to run around with my papers and try to figure out which sheet went to what section and that kind of thing.
Ruth Baker
Store Manager
Captain Grappo's Gluten-Free Foods
From a financial perspective, using a U.S. Quality Manager’s average hourly rate of $45.67, FoodDocs digital Food Safety Management System helps save the equivalent of $23,738 over a year.
Key takeaway: Paper has hidden risks and costs, but a centralized and customizable software makes it easier to onboard existing and new locations. This streamlines your process of scaling up distribution and sales as demand for your products grows.
On top of the financial risk, humans are prone to missing entries, illegible writing, or lost pages when manually filling records, which can lead to serious compliance gaps during inspections. In short, sticking with paper silently drains resources and invites error.
These risks ultimately hinder the ability to grow quickly and safely scale your food service locations or production.
Food businesses ought to look for tools that scale alongside them and that's what Gruppo Terroni has benefited from with FoodDocs.
The system provides us with an easy-to-use solution for standardizing our work processes, which helps support every employee's role in maintaining food safety monitoring and best practices. The value FoodDocs has added to our company goes well beyond the hours saved daily for our teams through streamlining daily monitoring activities and processes!
Michael Worbanski
Human Resources and Operations Safety Specialist
Gruppo Terroni
Ruth shared that “moving to FoodDocs really helped us in the fact that I wasn’t in the back office monitoring and verifying this all manually and potentially realizing I forgot something.”
This can be a huge waste of time, money, and resources. It’s not just management who likes FoodDocs either. The food handlers do, too, despite the change management that comes with new software adoption.
“[FoodDocs] has really made it a nice centralized, structured thing for us that we can actually keep up. Everybody just pitches in and now I think that they’re more hands on with that, it really helped them to get involved and see that this is something that’s important.”
Key takeaways: The more time food handlers spend walking to and from food safety log clipboards, the less time they’re spending on production lines or serving restaurant patrons. A digital Food Safety Management System trains your kitchen team in filling tasks on time and correctly, also automates routing checks and data entry, freeing up employees’ time on repetitive logging tasks.
As Francine wrote for FoodSafetyTech:
“Using pen and paper to audit restaurants, hotels, institutions and stores often results in increased labor, time, errors and expenses… Technology streamlines operations, improves safety protocols, reduces errors, integrates data — and so much more.”
Implementing a digital food safety management system into your operational processes greatly eliminates human error and keeps records complete and accurate at all times. As food businesses face labor shortages and manage increasingly tight budgets, going digital lets a lean team do more in less time (and with less risk of mistakes).
Michael said that FoodDocs has significantly helped Terroni increase the effectiveness of managing food safety.
The system provides their teams with an efficient way to monitor and verify food safety throughout their operations, including shipping, receiving, storage, food preparation, production, traceability, packaging, serving, and other work processes.
One tool that's been helpful for the management is building instructions into the tasks so it can be used not just as a recording tool but a training tool as well. So say it's a cleaning log that has the step-by-step procedure included in [the task] that they can walk through.
Michael Worbanski
Human Resources and Operations Safety Specialist
Gruppo Terroni
And for Martin, the Executive Chef at Northcare, what used to invite unnecessary risk with pen-and-paper food safety is no longer an issue with having FoodDocs’ mobile app on tablets.
You can quickly put in a couple bits of information, and you’re done. In that sense, the risk factor’s eliminated a lot more… There’s no risk of contamination. You won’t have paper falling about and folders everywhere… It’s a lot more efficient.
Martin McKee
Executive Chef
Northcare
In our case study with Craft Culinary’s Director of Culinary, Jacob Tew, he said:
Especially in times like now where there’s multiple events every day for some of our accounts serving 200-250 people, saving an hour a day is huge 'cause that's time prepping, that's time getting the food ready and taking care of the customer. So five hours may not seem like a lot but in the reality of things it's a good amount of time.
Jacob Tew
Director of Culinary
Craft Culinary Concepts
Key takeaways: Manual tracking increases the chance of errors or missing critical steps, leading to potential foodborne illness outbreaks. A single contamination incident can damage customer trust and result in legal and financial repercussions.
There’s a growing demographic of conscious consumers and suppliers limiting their partnerships to companies with the highest compliance standards. Embracing digital tools signals to clients and consumers that you’re serious about safety and quality.
Francine acknowledges that:
“While technology has previously been considered to be a luxury, today, digital tools are affordable, widespread and accessible. Technology that can help minimize labor, reduce (or eliminate) foodborne illness risks, and minimize food waste is not an expense, it’s an important investment… The benefits are huge.”
Companies that invest in the best paperless food safety systems set themselves apart, building greater brand trust and loyalty by proactively demonstrating excellence. Don’t let competitors outpace you by using superior food safety tech, especially when positioning your business for long-term growth.
Jacob Tew, the Director of Culinary, had a case where an inspector needed to see previous reports and ServSafe certificates while catering a remote event.
“We didn't have the paper copy with us because we were working remote. But I pulled them up on FoodDocs in a minute and showed her and that was it... So that’s a great tool to have.”
Having the ability to upload food safety documents is a powerful feature.
You can find previous inspections, you find their food handlers card, the manager's ServSafe card. And in years past at other places, it’s like ‘Oh we forgot to bring it. We don’t have it.’ But it's right there on my phone, if needed. And [inspectors] like that. They don't like people scrambling around and looking for stuff… It's all right here.
Jacob Tew
Director of Culinary
Craft Culinary Concepts
Happy auditors and positive inspections result in food safety compliance news that you can share with customers and suppliers alike to increase your brand reputation.
Key takeaway: Paper food safety systems quickly become burdensome at scale to maintain. The fact that digital intuitive solutions make food safety tasks more easy and accessible help engage entire teams.
People will always try to take the easier route and the same goes for software. In the food industry, quality managers and food handlers will much prefer using digital tools that are simple to use, easy on the eyes, and make their job faster.
For Martin, transitioning to and implementing FoodDocs went quite smoothly overall.
I was quite intimidated by it all, thinking this is completely new territory for me… Half of my tasks are so easy now… The transition definitely was surprisingly easy.
Martin McKee
Executive Chef
Northcare
In another call with our team, Martin also mentioned:
“The first gentleman I had working with me in the kitchen, who’s near retirement and not very tech-savvy, hates these things, but even he found it straightforward, so I think that’s solid proof.”
At Terroni, Michael worked with FoodDocs’ customer support to digitize all the work they were already doing and “thanks to gradual implementation processes [their] teams use FoodDocs solutions every day of our 7-day work week.”
When asked about how difficult it is to use FoodDocs’ food safety management software, Michael said:
One. Whatever the lowest is. Not difficult. For our chefs, you know, software, being tech savvy is not their main focus or experience… It’s not difficult for them to build their own monitoring checks, make changes to the checks, so I’d say for them it’s fairly easy.
Michael Worbanski
Human Resources and Operations Safety Specialist
Gruppo Terroni
The bottom line: transitioning to digital is far less daunting than it appears, and the longer you wait, the more money and peace of mind you leave on the table.
Food safety management software makes monitoring, traceability, and more so much easier. Whether you're a business owner, operations director, food safety or quality manager, or food handler, you're looking for ways to:
FoodDocs saves companies both time and money, while giving teams a food safety software that's actually easy to use. You can try all our product features with a 14-day free trial.
You can also watch this mini demo see how FoodDocs could benefit your business:
This explainer video will cover:
Discover how Northcare, a Scotland-based luxury residential care home with 9 locations and 8 production kitchens, easily implemented digital food...
See how Craft Culinary Concepts, a multi-site catering company, digitized food safety management with FoodDocs to save 7 hours per week on daily...
See how Captain Grappo, a gluten-free RTE meal producer, uses FoodDocs Food Safety Management Software to increase monitoring task efficiency by 25x.
