For Tommy Orpaz, vice president of business development for E-Control, one of the major draws for his software is that it prevents employees from filling out the HACCP checklist at a desk without checking the actual kitchen situation. Even good employees, Orpaz says, have a tendency to fill out positive answers on a paper survey without doing the check.

The automatic checklist reporting to a secure server, Orpaz says, helps ensure that employees are actually performing the check. A scanable tag called iButton, which works with both iQuality and IntelliCheck, tells the PDA if a temperature check is being done at the correct location. “[IntelliCheck] dramatically increased compliance with regulations, because everybody knows that big brother is watching. He knows what happens, he knows the time the job was done,” he says.

Sammon says that her company has even worked with a client to help create employee identification badges with an RFID chip in them. While that might give employees an uneasy feeling, the chip will recognize if an employee moves from the kitchen to an unsanitary area. If an employee uses the bathroom or steps outside to smoke a cigarette, the badge will flash red if the employee hasn’t washed his or her hands after returning. It’s a real-life version of Gary Larson’s Far Side comic, where a man leaving a restaurant bathroom unwittingly activates a flashing “Did Not Wash Hands” sign on the wall.

This approach, however, has been tried unsuccessfully in the past, Snyder says. Badges that track employees and blink red end up mysteriously lost or broken by disgruntled employees. “It gets to be more of a fight,” Snyder says.

The goal of all of this electronic gadgetry, Sammon says, is not only to monitor and control food-borne illnesses and protect customer safety, but also to protect a restaurant’s image.

“The reason I saw the applicability of HACCP to our industry is because we spend so much time in restaurants,” Sammon says. (ParTech is a major hardware supplier to some of the biggest quick-service chains.) “I look at the tier one E.Coli breakout ... their brand suffered and information suggests they lost $20 million in the first quarter. I suspect it is larger than that.”

Taco Bell, after an E.Coli breakout last year, closed several of its locations on the East Coast, according to Newsweek magazine.

One way iQuality could address E.Coli contamination or fears from contaminated spinach, which caused several deaths in 2006, is to alert every restaurant about a food recall instantly, and then prompt managers to indicate whether they have removed the contaminated food from the restaurant. Sammon compares a recall response without wireless PDA software: “If you have a chain of 1,000 restaurants, that is 30 hours of phone calls and you have to assume that (managers) will do the recall. That’s six hours to get that message out, even with five staff members,” she says.

For Snyder, the bottom line for food safety is influenced more by effectively training employees and ensuring that they follow health guidelines for cooking meat and washing their hands. A PDA “doesn’t train the employee. Unless you have rules and every new employee is trained to follow those rules, it’s worthless. The PDA gives icing on the cake, gives proof that a problem didn’t happen at a particular restaurant,” he says.