“Too much of these checklists consist of [questions like] ‘Is the floor clean?’ What we need to know is, is the guy washing his hands? Are all employees trained and certified by the cook?” Snyder says.

While he supports using technology to improve health and safety checks and says that a big chain is probably “dumb” if they aren’t using an electronic device to report HACCP checks, the key is using wireless PDA technology to ask the right questions, Snyder says.

Snyder helps Denny’s restaurants with food safety issues. He says that the company’s managers are committed to cutting employee bonuses or firing them if they violate hand-washing regulations. Most chains, he says, aren’t as assertive in dealing with policy violations.

HACCP checklists, while improved by new technologies, don’t ensure that a cook is trained to properly prepare a hamburger, or that an employee isn’t transporting feces germs from the bathroom into the kitchen.

An integral part of the iQuality system is purchasing and attaching a temperature probe to the PDA device. E-Control Systems, Inc. makes a nearly identical system called IntelliCheck, which features a wireless temperature probe, while iQuality recommends a probe that is tethered to the PDA. This allows whoever is running down the HACCP checklist to stick the probe in food samples in order to determine if they are being cooked at an appropriate temperature. If the chicken fingers aren’t hot enough or the soup is too cold, iQuality or IntelliCheck will flash a message to the user advising them on what to do to fix the situation, and it will also send an alert to the corporate level, so managers know there is a problem that needs to be fixed.

Stathakis, whose company was one of the first to implement iQuality in its restaurants, said that the upgrade cost money and even takes more time to implement than the paper checklist. However, he says the instant, enterprise-wide reporting abilities are well worth it.

“It cost a whole lot of money to roll this out, but what it provided was a guaranteed accurate reporting and centralized reporting,” he says. “The No.1 huge value is that regional managers can go on the [Web] portal in the morning and it’s been automated to send an exception report to district managers. Its an awesome product, we are thrilled with it.”

Stathakis says that his company quadrupled the scope of their HACCP checks, but that checklist only takes about 50 percent more time to complete than the paper and clipboard method used previously.

Claim Jumper uses a military-grade waterproof, shock-resistant PDA from Tripod Data Systems, as well as a temperature probe. Aside from checking on food temperatures on the production line, preparation area, and walk-in freezer, Stathakis says the company uses readings from litmus paper to input the sanitation level of the soap bucket for the wipe-down rags or the dish washer.