As quick-serve restaurants grapple with worker shortages amidst a lingering pandemic, operators are looking for ways to make business more streamlined and ensure food safety is never compromised. Back-of-house technologies are playing a crucial role in helping operators execute against operational standards.
Case in point: TransAct’s BOHA! Restaurant Operations Platform digital ecosystem, which automates many back-of-house processes including labeling, temperature taking, temperature monitoring of refrigeration equipment, checklists, and more.
“With the current labor shortage, operators can’t train people fast enough—but food safety is non-negotiable,” says Miguel Ortiz, vice president of marketing at TransAct. “If all you have is paper-based systems that staff have to spend time learning, that’s inefficient and can also be unsafe.”
Nicholas Vitt, marketing director at The Chicken Shack, which has 23 locations in six states with eight stores in development, says the BOHA! system boosts efficiency, saves on labor, and improves food safety.
“Before BOHA!, we used either masking tape or sticky tape on food storage containers,” he says. “It would shrivel up, people forgot to do it, and some containers had it, and some didn’t. BOHA! makes it super simple—just press a button, and it makes a label that has the prep date and discard date on it.”
BOHA! also has a temperature taking function, which ensures that employees are properly temping food items. If food should be cooked to 165 degrees and it only reaches 160, for instance, BOHA! alerts the employee and walks them through a corrective action. This ensures operators and owners that proper processes are being followed.
“This is something everyone is worried about, because with the labor shortage, employees may feel pressured to skimp on some of these processes,” Ortiz says.
Ensuring refrigeration equipment is functioning within specific temperatures is paramount to food safety. With BOHA! Sense, temperature monitoring of freezers and refrigerators, operators can rest assured that inventory is kept at proper temperatures to avoid spoilage and a possible food safety incident.
“We have customers that have saved $5,000 worth of inventory because they were alerted that the temperature inside the cooler was going out of range,” Ortiz says.
Ortiz also notes that in this competitive labor market, anything that operators can do to make jobs more attractive to potential employees is a must. Back-of-house technology takes the guesswork and tediousness of repetition tasks off the table, allowing employees to focus on what’s most important: serving fresh food in a timely manner.
As regulations evolve, restaurants can count on BOHA! to keep track of their food safety processes and checklists in a neat, organized way that can be accessed via the cloud from anywhere in the world at any time.
“Health inspectors love it,” Vitt says. “It really is an all-in-one solution for everything that we need and we think any growing franchise would benefit greatly from using it.”
To learn more about how BOHA! can help with food safety, visit bohasolutions.com.
By Davina van Buren
