Discover how this residential care home business's food safety became more efficient with easy-to-use software.
Discover how this residential care home business's food safety became more efficient with easy-to-use software.
Food safety is one of the most important earmarks of a quality residential care home. That’s exactly why food safety management software plays such an important role at Northcare, a family-run residential care business with 9 locations and 8 production kitchens across the central belt of Scotland.
Indeed, this is the attitude that every care home or facility should have because the people being cared for belong to a vulnerable demographic and, therefore, require even higher levels of food safety and controls.
We had a great conversation recently with Martin McKee, the Executive Chef at Northcare. He also serves as Head Chef at the Balmoral location, which was the first of their nine locations to implement FoodDocs’ Food Safety Management Software.
Watch this compilation of the best parts of our conversation:
On a given day, Martin and the other kitchen teams will serve breakfast, lunch, dinner, snacks, afternoon tea, private dining and themed events, and more for residents and guests.
“It’s like a hotel with very high-end chefs catering for you.”
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Northcare operated on a paper-based food safety system before the Balmoral opening. That’s when the new manager at the time said:
“Why don’t we try [FoodDocs]. I’ve got a friend who’s a chef and he says it’s great going paperless.”
And it was that word-of-mouth suggestion from a restaurant industry chef that started Northcare on its digital food safety journey.
“When my manager at the time suggested going digital with the new home, we wanted to try and step the game up a little bit on everything… It seemed like a natural progression into the future… Now it’s far more efficient for us in every way.”
Food safety has remained a priority over the 30+ years that Northcare has been in business. A food safety management system has always been present but it existed — along with its accompanying forms, checklists, and logs — in paper form.
After years of using an analog system, it became clear that monitoring food safety this way was:
Acknowledging these points of friction helped Northcare to explore what digital food safety management could do to improve their operations.
To Martin’s surprise, transitioning to and implementing FoodDocs’ food safety software went quite smoothly overall, sharing that “it was a lot easier than [he] thought it was going to be.”
“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.”
In a previous 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.”
The main benefits for Northcare’s production kitchens and hospitality teams are two-fold.
Martin illustrated one example of trying to serve 30 meals from a hot trolley while pulling out a folder and trying to fill sheets or look for a pen (i.e., a potentially fallen object).
On the other hand, with both production kitchen and hospitality staff having the 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.”
As an Executive Chef, Martin appreciates the real-time monitoring and overview dashboard because it allows him to quickly see how each location is performing on tasks, especially for the hospitality staff.
“[FoodDocs] gives me that overview of what homes are underperforming… I can see immediately where the absence level is… and see what homes have got staffing level pressures.”
The real-time overview dashboard is also helpful on a monthly or quarterly basis for other upper management.
“Many of us look at it from an administrative view like your head chef, your head of hospitality, your executive chef, your managers, so they can all have an overview and look at where things are going.”
From a managerial point of view, Martin shared another beneficial example: at the end of every day, previously, he and the other Head Chefs had a sheet that they would have to check all the boxes for as one of the compliance tasks.
But that’s frustrating.
“It’s not frustrating ticking a box… It’s just the ease of [FoodDocs]… You don’t dread it. You dread going to the clipboard and turning page after page, pen out, all that kind of stuff."
Martin brings up features that contribute to making both operations and team members more efficient, including the:
When Northcare’s Balmoral location implemented the digital system, FoodDocs’ support team onboarded Martin to get set up for success
Customer support is always quickly available to help. However, as each residential care home location has its differences, Martin can customize everything himself in seconds or a few minutes, without needing to reach out for support every time.
“It’s been very customizable. When we first set this up for Balmoral… I had a contact at FoodDocs… Then when we rolled this out to the next home, we used that same model, but then I said, right, we need to delete this, add that, and so on.”
As Martin puts it: “It’s hard to train staff fully, all the time, especially if they’re new. But if you can explain the system, it’s quite easy.”
On a paper-based system, staff would have to read the corrective action fine print for things like incorrect fridge or food-holding temperatures. If they write down something that’s not within parameters, they don’t think it’s wrong because there’s no prompt after they put down a number on paper.
"With FoodDocs, it doesn't allow you to put anything out of range. It’ll prompt you immediately and say, right, you put down 7 degrees for your fridge, why is that? Was a door left open? Was there a problem? And you have to put down an answer or go back out and put down the correct range. That's one of the best features.”
Staff enjoy that there are a lot of pre-defined options to just select from, rather than having to write everything out.
“The fact that you've also got drop-down boxes where you can just tick, tick, tick, tick so you're not constantly writing lots of information down… It’s fool proof that way… If you don’t know this information, FoodDocs teaches you as you’re using it.”
As a residential care home or nursing facility, your food safety standards must be as high as possible — and rightly so. You support a much more vulnerable and susceptible demographic.
FoodDocs' food safety management software makes it easy to do that for both front- and back-of-house staff, with benefits such as:
When setting up your personalized monitoring system, you can choose whether to create:
You can also add as many different fields and frequencies as you need to your monitoring logs, pause and skip tasks when needed (e.g., vacations, emergencies, holidays), and add step-by-step instructions to help your team complete daily tasks correctly.
Digital monitoring checks include corrective actions. If a task is out of range, a prompt will guide your team on how to respond, ensuring food safety and saving time on training. Simply start using the pre-set corrective actions or create your own.
The instant overview gives a simple and powerful outline of the Food Safety Management System from all your business locations. This feature helps save your time on supervision.
Another benefit is the ability to remotely review who follows food safety tasks and which units or departments have issues in time. So there's no need to go on-site to discover problems too late. Try FoodDocs today with a 14-day free trial!
Or check out our other customer success stories:
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See how Captain Grappo, a gluten-free RTE meal producer, uses FoodDocs Food Safety Management Software to increase monitoring task efficiency by 25x.
This buyer guide teaches you how to buy food safety management software in 8 practical steps that will take you from piles of paper to digital...
