It's time to meet one of our customers, a successful restaurant group, Gruppo Terroni.
Meet Michael Worbanski, Gruppo Terroni's Human Resources and Operations Safety Specialist. Michael is responsible for rolling out and implementing the FoodDocs' Food Safety System.
Recently, the FoodDocs team had a productive interview with Michael to dig into their company's experiences and thoughts on food safety challenges and FoodDocs.
Let’s dive in! Explore the topics below to see how Gruppo Terroni tackled its food safety challenges, why the team chose FoodDocs as their solution, the value they gained from implementing the software on their journey, and what one inspector said to Terroni about using FoodDocs.
What challenges did Gruppo Terroni encounter before using FoodDocs?
Our company was looking for a system to organize the work we do to effectively monitor our operations and commit to food safety compliance — which is very important for any food business.
As Michael shared, "The 3 main reasons why we were on a search for a food safety management system were:
- With many locations, how to organize the work in one central system.
- Implement a fully customizable, effective tool to help us maintain our high-quality standards and compliance with applicable regulations.
- Consolidate the processes we use to manage food safety.
We wanted a system that would support our efforts to continuously provide a way to monitor progress, verify compliance, and efficiently train our teams."
Gruppo Terroni locations previously used in-house systems and paper-based monitoring logs. FoodDocs provided a completely digital solution.
What made Gruppo Terroni choose FoodDocs?
We chose FoodDocs for an all-in-one solution. It is valuable for us to have a central system for managing information throughout all our locations.
Three critical points made FoodDocs stand out as a digital compliance solution over the rest:
- A complete solution for the company's commitment to food safety compliance.
- An intuitive, convenient, and easy-to-use system to maintain the company's food safety regulations.
- A useful platform to gather and organize information from different departments.
Interior of Sud Forno, one of Gruppo Terroni's ten unique locations.
What does Gruppo Terroni value the most about FoodDocs?
"The system provides us with an easy-to-use solution for standardizing our work processes," as Michael put it, "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!
Although the system is very uniform and intuitive in general, the benefits we find most valuable from FoodDocs are the following:
- Our team members easily understand product setup and use.
- Instructions on monitoring logs assist with training and provide a useful reference for our workers.
- Centralized storage for all important documents with no chance of getting anything lost or disorganized.
With no hesitation, I can say that the company has already seen the significant contribution of smart software.
Everything we use FoodDocs for, including our recordkeeping, helps ensure we always maintain best practices.
FoodDocs has significantly helped our company increase the effectiveness of managing food safety.
The system provides our teams with an efficient way to monitor and verify food safety throughout our operations, including shipping, receiving, storage, food preparation, production, traceability, packaging, serving, and other work processes."
How has the digital transformation helped Gruppo Terroni managers?
"In addition to our team becoming increasingly more productive and efficient, FoodDocs has helped our leaders manage many parts of their roles.
Training our employees has now become more streamlined and less time-consuming for management. FoodDocs provides a tool to ensure standardized instruction and training records. In addition, the company now has a concrete method to validate compliance.
Terroni sees FoodDocs solutions as:
a useful tool that reduces the amount of time required to monitor and verify all food safety tasks. Management relies on real-time information to make decisions and verify tasks.
With FoodDocs' smart solutions, Gruppo Terroni management now has an easy-to-use system to help ensure food safety compliance and protect our guests from food safety issues.
A food spread of pizza, charcuterie, and salad at one of Gruppo Terroni's restaurants.
How did the team welcome the new food safety software?
"Switching to an unfamiliar platform can always present challenges but the transition to a digital food safety platform went very well. We took the work we were already doing and digitized it in a system with helpful features that were easy to use.
We implemented FoodDocs' Food Safety Management System slowly and steadily into our everyday operations while gradually expanding to ensure that everyone learned how to use the system properly."
Thanks to gradual implementation processes, our teams use FoodDocs solutions every day of our 7-day work week.
How did the food safety inspector like Terroni's food safety management system?
During a local City of Toronto food safety inspection this year, Terroni received a stellar report from the inspector which FoodDocs helped support by keeping all supporting records in one easy, accessible location.
The records stored in FoodDocs helped demonstrate the restaurant group's ongoing compliance with all sections of the inspector's report.
FoodDocs makes the inspections easier for us because all the data is stored in one location.
So we asked Michael to share what their local inspector thought of Terroni's choice of food safety software:
Which are Gruppo Terroni's favorite features?
Although there are many useful FoodDocs features, Michael said the ones they use most include the following:
- Gruppo Terroni leaders can access information 24/7 when needed.
- Digital monitoring logs and checklists:
- Temperature log
- Opening and closing checklists
- Cleaning and sanitation logs for workstations and equipment
- Equipment maintenance log
- Audits
- The ability to add instructions in each log and checklist whether they be written, photos, or even videos.
- The feature for attaching photos or videos for verification of compliance.
- Production Traceability System for making lot codes and tracking food products and ingredients in their production facilities.
- Cloud storage for organizing important documents.
Background info about Terroni
- Operated since: 1992
- Country: Canada
- Locations: 9 unit locations (different business nature) with approximately 1000 employees
- Using FoodDocs since: June 2022
Terroni first opened in 1992 on Queen Street West in Toronto, Ontario as a small storefront selling southern Italian staples. Today, Gruppo Terroni has grown to encompass nine locations including three Terroni restaurants, two specialty restaurants, two bakery restaurants named Sud Forno, and two commissary kitchens and storefronts named Spaccio.
Having been in business for over 30 years now, Gruppo Terroni prides itself on maintaining its core values by emphasizing the simplicity and quality of the ingredients it imports from Italy. The company has managed to preserve its essence, starting from its raw materials, or materia prima in Italian, and the traditional and artisanal approach it takes in making all of its dishes.
Do you also want to reduce time spent on monitoring and verification like Terroni?
Like Gruppo Terroni, every food business can achieve more efficiency in monitoring with the help of FoodDocs.
Switching to our digital food safety platform is super easy — all it takes is 15 minutes of your time to get set up.
Powered by artificial intelligence and a machine learning program, our software automatically creates intuitive monitoring logs and checklists based on your business operations. After describing your operations to our software, it will intuitively generate the most applicable food safety logs and checks for your team.
This is what our food safety management software looks like in action:
Step-by-step instructions
Helps your team to save time training new or existing team members
Temperature log
Helps your team to remember to log the correct storage temperature to ensure food safety
Customizable monitoring logs
Ensure that every task is done and correctly reported.
Production traceability system
Make possible recalls easy and nothing to stress about with a comprehensive system.
Cloud storage
Real-time dashboard
In addition to these product features, you can also get other management and food safety features from the FoodDocs smart Food Safety Management System.
Experience the benefits of our product features first-hand using our free 14-day trial.