[Jerry Juneau] Cafe Rio is a Mexican grill restaurant with kind of an Americanized flair. We started in St. George in 1997. We have 155 restaurants today. We focus on creating a five-star meal experience at a two-star price. Many of the ingredients are created fresh in the restaurants. We do a lot of chopping, a lot of cooking, a lot of shredding. We work with fresh vegetables that get delivered to the restaurants every day. We have a fairly extensive menu with a lot of moving parts. I'm the director of training for Cafe Rio. I'm also in charge of food safety. I create systems and processes in the restaurants for tracking.
We were using a paper-based logging system in all of our restaurants. Every restaurant had their own book. It was pretty extensive. All of our checklists, our logs for temperatures, all that was contained in that book. The books were supposed to be retained to the restaurants for a year, and then we audited them either one-on-one when we were in the restaurants, or sometimes the health departments would look at them, and sometimes our independent auditors would look at them. So when I got here at Cafe Rio, one of the first things I did was to look at all the restaurants at those books. We were less than 50% compliance with all of the things the restaurants were supposed to be doing. So I was very concerned that if something happened in one of our restaurants, there would be a lag in time before we realized what was going on and an even longer period of time before we could respond to it. And the health department's actually assessed a higher risk level for us, which meant that they visited our restaurants more frequently. I wanted to look for a cloud-based logging system, a place where I could collect all of the data in one location, monitor compliance, and then provide feedback to the restaurants based on it.
Jolt was the second company that I tried, and I didn't go any further. I loved it. What I liked about Jolt was that everything is cached into the iPads themselves. If you take information and log it into an iPad, and there's an interruption in internet service, the information is still retained. As soon as the internet interruption was solved, all the information would be uploaded to the cloud again. In Jolt, we use several different kinds of lists. The one that we use most frequently are simple lists where we record temperatures across a very specific schedule of time. So in a particular restaurant, we would take some hot temperatures, some cold temperatures, four times a day, and then that information is loaded to the cloud. The second kind of list that I use with Jolt is a simple checklist of operational items in the restaurant. We call them walkthroughs. There's three a day, and the managers walk through the restaurant looking at cleanliness items, fixtures and repair items, any maintenance items that are required. They take pictures of things like equipment that we use. They take pictures of the dumpster areas. They take pictures of the exterior of the building. We can use those pictures for compliance purposes. The third type of list that we use is similar. We use a food safety checklist where they walk through the restaurant and take temperatures of equipment three times a day. Walk-in temperatures, temperatures of the hot equipment that cooked food, temperatures of the grills, temperatures of the ovens, temperatures of the hot water, things like that. And so those are really the three lists that we use every day. There are other lists that pop up on demand. So I have closing lists in the system, opening lists in the system. I have lists on weekly food safety compliance, and they use those whenever we need them.
I've also used Jolt for program implementations. We roll in product. I'll create a Jolt list on all of the compliance areas that the new product requires. And then the managers have to complete those lists on some sort of schedule to show that they've done all the things that are required for the new product. The district managers create a list for a specific restaurant when they do a visit. And so it's a structured schedule of all the activities they do when they're in a restaurant. They complete them whenever they're in a restaurant, and those get rolled up to their supervisors. When a list is completed, the restaurant gets a daily score. The daily score is how many lists were generated versus just how many lists were completed. Those scores are then rolled up to me and I use them for feedback. We've raised that compliance to 95%. So on a typical week, 95% of my lists are completed on time in all of our restaurants across our entire company. The health departments are delighted with the change in that. Jolt has also allowed us to get a reduced risk assessment from our health departments. Our health department reports are terrific. our compliance issues have nothing to do with times and temperatures. All that stuff is nearly 100%. And the health departments in response have lowered the risk level. What that means is that they have told us that they're so comfortable with our operations, they visit us less frequently.
We're talking about adding a security list to our restaurant. Are the safes working correctly? Are the back door locks working correctly? Are the alarms working correctly? You can manage product rollouts. through creating checklists that roll up to a central location. And you can monitor it all from a central location. You don't have to have meetings. You don't have to visit every restaurant every year to look at this stuff. You can take that stuff away and let your operators work on other things that are more important to your customers. You can dramatically streamline, fine-tune, and improve your back-of-the-house systems through using a cloud-based monitoring system like Jolt. Every walk-in has an ambient air sensor, and that information is also rolled up to me every day. And I monitor those temperatures here at the office. The sensors all have alarms in them. So if we set the sensors based on Jolt software to alert us, alert is very specific. group of people whenever a sensor reads a temperature that's over whatever parameters I set. For example, if a sensor is over 41 degrees for more than 30 minutes, it alerts the area manager, the general manager, and sends a note to the restaurant. If it's over 41 degrees for an hour, the information is sent to a wider group of people. As the length of time that the temperature is over 41 degrees increases, more and more people are involved. The level of product loss since we've had the monitoring system and the walk-ins has decreased every year. We haven't lost any product this year at all. It saved us a ton of money.
We have hundreds of products in every restaurant that get rotated every day. So our employees would have to sit there and write out labels. The labeling system has eliminated all that. It automatically spits out the labels whenever we need them, and we use them to mark our products on the line and the walk-in for deliveries. The labor savings there have been terrific. That's 3 to 4 hours a day that we saved in time because they don't have to create paper labels for everything. Some of that labor is redeployed on other areas, mostly customer service. They're able to take those people and put them to the front. Five years ago, we built a central kitchen where we took some of our processes in our restaurants and moved them into a central location so the restaurants don't have to prep everything in every restaurant every day. Two years ago, we put our proteins in that kitchen, shredded meat, shredded chicken, shredded pork. The USDA is required to supervise that activity. And so Joel showed me how I could use it to meet the USDA compliance. The USDA loves the system. We simply didn't know how bad we were with the paper-based logging, and I'm sure a lot of restaurants are in that same boat. You know, they're always struggling with chasing information when it's paper-based because you have to physically review the paper.
What makes a difference in Jolt is I can push a button on a dashboard and I could review any information at any time in any restaurant on compliance or temperatures. My compliance to food safety requirements in my restaurants is a ton better. We went from a 40% compliance to a 95% compliance on all things that we measure and record and log in the restaurants. That's A tremendous improvement. I can respond immediately to issues with walk-in refrigerators and give my facility teams about. I can partner with our ops team on rolling out a project or an initiative by utilizing the JOLT system, creating a new list, and rolling up that information. All that stuff, the difference is immeasurable.
