While researching the resource-strapped Kilimanjaro region of Africa, Christine Schindler used her biomedical engineering degree to develop low-cost, durable, and accessible hospital tools useful in critical situations without air conditioning, power, internet, or proper shelter.
Upon returning to the U.S. with a new perspective on public healthcare, she was surprised to find the same issue: a lack of simple and affordable medical-grade solutions to everyday challenges such as foodborne illness. The CDC estimates foodborne diseases cause 48 million people to get sick. Also, 128,000 are hospitalized, and 3,000 die each year. Over half of these illness outbreaks are associated with food from restaurants.
“Even domestically, people would say they wished we had more healthcare solutions that weren’t expensive or intricate, and it made me think about the work I had done in the developing world,” Schindler says. “I saw what was happening in our community, outbreaks resulting in hospitalizations and even death. It inspired me to draw on my experiences of building low-cost tools to solve this problem [in hospitality].”
She bought a 3D printer and created HandScanner, which can detect foodborne illness pathogens, like E. coli, salmonella, and listeria. Using fluorescent spectral imaging and visible green or red lights, this flagship product was made to be mounted on walls next to handwashing sinks, where employees could ensure their hands were clear of invisible contaminants. The data from these scans are then reported to management, who can use the insights to adjust their food safety training and operations accordingly.
Schindler didn’t stop there; under the name PathSpot, she expanded beyond the scanners and created a holistic ecosystem covering all major aspects of safety and operations in the back of house. This includes a temperature monitoring platform with small sensors to track temperature ranges in refrigerators and freezers and send alerts when it moves out of a safe range.
There’s also a digital labeling system to streamline expiration management, plugging directly into inventory systems and automatically printing the appropriate labels to reduce food waste for operators.
The final component of Pathspot includes a digital logbook and audit tool, taking all required safety checklists and creating a dashboard for hospitality managers to store and analyze data and make the biggest impact on their business in a busy operational setting.
“When you bring all of these safety aspects together into one system, you can lean them on each other,” Schindler adds. “Our ultimate goal is to collect data and bring it to the forefront and create a safety system that makes everyone healthier and in a better position to operate more efficiently.”
PathSpot’s internal data reports a 70 percent reduction in audit failure rate, a 25 percent reduction in employee sick days, and a 60 percent reduction in handwashing coaching time as a result of its tools.
The platform has caught the eye of several prominent brands in the quick-service space, including Taco Bell, Arby’s, Starbucks, and Dave’s Hot Chicken. Schindler’s tools are now being utilized by over 10,000 restaurants nationwide.
PathSpot has even forged partnerships with award-winning hospitality expert and restauranter Jon Taffer, who incorporated Schindler’s HandScanner in Taffer’s Tavern, which made its national debut in 2020.
Reflecting on how the pandemic shifted PathSpot’s trajectory, Schindler says she’s still feeling the ripple effects of the public’s extra awareness of their health and wellness. Now more than ever, she adds, consumers and employees are looking for clean and healthy environments.
“People are more understanding of transmission vectors of illness, and we’ve been able to provide a solution for them,” Schindler says. “We’ve seen a big ROI in labor retention for the companies leveraging our products because employees want to work in a safe facility to protect themselves and others. Cleanliness is the new ambiance.”
Recently featured on the Forbes’ 30 under 30 list, Schindler has experienced the unique obstacles related to becoming an entrepreneur at a young age, especially with inventing a product from scratch.
“There are plenty of moments where the path forward is unclear and I don’t necessarily have the life experience yet, but I have to push forward anyway. It can be very isolating to be building something that doesn’t exist,” Schindler says. “Nobody’s ever done customer support or installations for a holistic food safety system. I tell my whole team they’re inventors, no matter what their role is.”
Building a team of diverse talent from different backgrounds and fields of expertise has been rewarding for Schindler, who leans on their support when she feels discouraged or overwhelmed—she believes in the power of building a strong network and uplifting others.
In college, Schindler created an organization called Girls Engineering Change, focusing on bringing young girls to college campuses to build low-cost health devices and watch the impact of engineering on day-to-day life as they are donated to places in need across the world. She remains on the board, helping to usher in the next generation of female engineers and showing them PathSpot as an example of what they can accomplish with a career in STEM.
“We need to change the perception of what an engineer is,” Schindler says. “If you ask young girls what they want to be when they grow up, they’ll often pick very altruistic careers, but never consider engineering. They don’t know how creative, impactful, and interesting what I do is, so a lot of the work I do with the girls is just changing this misconception.”
Schindler is working to scale PathSpot and expand into as many facets of the food service industry as possible—including cafeterias, grocery stores, hotel dining, full-service restaurants, and food manufacturing plants. She hopes to tackle problems in the food safety ecosystem as they come, creating new solution sets and identifying additional issues.
“The challenge is vast, but it’s an opportunity to be proactive and put a full stop to foodborne illnesses,” Schindler says. “When people tell me they feel safer coming to work because they have my products, or they’re seeing a huge improvement in their operations, it fuels me to continue moving forward, even if solving these problems keeps me up at night.”
