[Guy Yehiav] Hey everyone, thanks for joining us today. I'm honored to have on stage with us Dr. Larry Payton. From Sushic. And our queen, head our food safety at SmartSense, Callin. Through that session, you will learn about the limitation of the manual process of food safety. As you know, when you're actually having those manual logs, there's inconsistency on the documentation there's inconsistency of Standard Operating Procedures. There's a lot of book on training. But between us, who actually read all of it every morning? And so, the automation, we'll talk about the automation side and how that enables a culture of, an alignment of food safety on a day-to-day basis. So then, if you have even temps, you train them once and then when they actually get the prescriptive action, what they need to do, they just remind them of what they should do at every given. Second, we believe that people are coming to work to do the right thing. How will I just guide them on what they should do. And assume that they will then do it and keep us away from being on the front of a newspaper, right, high risk areas.
We'll end up talking about that culture that will align for a long-term success of both food safety and taking all these risks down, reducing also energy, becoming more efficient, more effective. Through the long-term success. With that, I will hand it over to Callin to take it further. Callin.
[Callin Godson-Green] Thank you, Guy. Hey, everyone. I'm so honored that you've all come to this food safety talk. My food safety background means that anyone that attends something like this, you and I are one and the same, and we're here for the same reasons. We want to produce safe food and do what's right. For not only our customers, our guests, but our employees as well. So let's talk about the risks of manual food safety. I'm sure you're all aware pen and paper has been around for many, many years, even worse than pen and paper, pencil and paper. Because we can rub that out in a few weeks when we realize the temperatures are wrong. What are the risks with this? Firstly and foremostly, human error is something you can't control. You can train people all you want every day. Do you know introductory food safety, revisionary food safety? People make mistakes, and that's completely fine. You can't eliminate that.
The second thing, inconsistent record keeping. So today I'm working. I love food safety, so I'm going to do this every check, I'm going to do it diligently. I'm going to do it properly. I'm going to check that it's right and if there's a non-conformance, I'm going to act on it. Tomorrow. We have Guy here. He's going to come in. Just look at the outside of our coolers. Write down the temperatures. And move on. That's fine. Until the manager, Dr. Larry comes in the next day, he's verifying the records as he should and he sees guide to the checks yesterday and he happily wrote down that one of our fridges is at 55° and he went about his business. No action taken. His knowledge wasn't there. He filled it in and he did truly read the outside. You didn't temp the food. We have not done anything. There's been no action until Larry comes in the next day. Who knows how long that food has been? A temp, who knows. How many people we've served that food?
Manual checks are labor intensive. I think everyone here works in the restaurant industry or an associate of [it]. Labor is one of our biggest issues at the moment, if not the biggest issue. We do not have the staff, the time to send people off doing long manual checks. Honestly, their focus should be our guests. Everything is about guest experience. That's a massive KPI these days in restaurants. Let's reallocate that labor to doing what they need to do and serve the people that come to our restaurants.
Delayed issue detection. Again, fold into that line of Larry coming in the next day. Maybe he's even a district manager. He comes in once a month if we're lucky, and he notices the issues. The limited accountability is also a massive problem. The example I gave, I knew that Guy did that check so we can talk to Guy and retrain him. Majority of the time, you have no idea who completed that log. It's a scribbled-in temperature. They don't sign it. How can we improve that? How do we get that accountability naturally and almost automatically? That was kind of the background of introducing automated digital food safety monitoring.
We have a quote here from Jollibee. Does anyone know Jollibee, have a Jollibee near them? Yeah. I live in New York City, so we are fortunate enough to have a Jollibee. They're a Filipino fast-food chain. If anyone doesn't know, they're taking Europe by storm and subsequently they're now in the US. 81 stores in the US and growing consistently. We work with Jollibee. They are actually a partner of ours that we started with them. They had no automated food safety system. And what we've learned from two years of implementation with them is that they basically said, Davy, who was very honest, you know, he's like I know you guys know restaurants, I'm not going to lie. Pencil whipping was the biggest issue. He's like, I would come in doing an audit. I would know that it was pencil whipped. There's no evidence and the temperatures are compliant and they're compliant when I'm there. But I know they fill that in at 9:55 on a Tuesday because they're closing at 10 and nothing's been done at all. He basically told us that it limited unusual trends. Specifically, every fridge in the restaurant being at 40.2 degrees every day of the week. He's like now we actually see. when there's issues. The biggest thing for him was that he realized that there actually wasn't a decrease in issues immediately, but more visibility into the existing issues. As a food safety person, that meant more to him.
So, I've gone on why manual paper is bad. Or outdated maybe is a better word, not bad necessarily. But, if you have the opportunity to automate your food systems, what benefits can you get? Of course, #1 why I'm here is that it improves food safety and I genuinely do believe that it gives you that real-time information. It means that when the fridge as soon as it goes above 41, you can know about that if that's what your KPI is. If that's what you choose to know, it doesn't mean I need to wait for a manager or verification or someone with, you know, Serve Safe search to come in to understand the logistics, the people that need to know will know. It also helps you alert the correct people if I'm not there, you know the hierarchy, the escalation of who needs to know is vital. It also means that the folders and folders and folders that we used to have in our offices, I think everyone knows that even if you're the smallest restaurant you're expected to keep all these files for three years, and your office can be gone digital, on the cloud, as they all say. The other area that is kind of a special interest for me and is relatively new is the idea that having a digital system can also help reduce food waste. We've seen this as a massive KPI, kind of sustainability, especially since the pandemic has come forward and we're looking for ways to continuously reduce waste. The most obvious method of so is knowing when your units are out of compliance. Immediately you can relocate the food so that food is saved, but even more than that is the soft costs with it. So, think about this like your little boy goes down. You need to call an emergency facilities guy to come back. If you can see that data in advance. And see, Oh, it's been trending up. It's going up two degrees for the last four weeks. Maybe we'll do a proactive maintenance call. Someone will come out and it's way cheaper. Not to mention the actual physical cost of throwing away food and then maybe loss of business if you know your favorite salad isn't on the menu and you go in and you're like, Well, I'm never going there again. They don't pump up six. Overall, I believe, and I think you guys can agree that having a digital food safety system, it just makes it more, much more of a proactive than reactive system. For food safety, it's all well and good, being reactive, very important to be reactive. But almost when there's a food safety incident, reactive is too late, something has already happened. There's a risk there. Whatever we can do to proactively address that is key and vital for us all.
That's enough of me. I would love to give you guys some insights into Dr. Larry's world and his experience with moving from a paper bases to an automated system.
[Dr. Larry Payton] Thank you, Callin. Thank you all for spending this time with us today. I want to first thank the whole SmartSense team for giving me this opportunity to share with you all a little bit about how our sushi program has been digitized over the last several years. We are a sushi company that operates in mostly grocery stores. We have about 400 units across the U.S. As we also have a few universities, some fine dining locations as well as corporate housing. And we operate in a very high-risk environment, which the previous group that came up talked about health departments. And when health departments consider sushi, they categorize us as high-risk, which in turn calls for lots of documentation and paper. So as Callin and Guy have pointed out, we started off with the old paper log books. I mean, let's not call it a book. It was more of a binder where we had all of these 7 logs per day that our folks had to fill out three times a day. And it was really a rigorous program. So, once we found this solution, it has been super beneficial to every part of our business.
Just a little bit of background about our company. We really partner in with retail companies like Giant Eagle. And with that, we are service obsessed. Our principles really make us die-hard when it comes to pleasing our customers, pleasing our partners. In fact, there‘s a joke around our organization [that] I'm the only one in the company who says no. But I say a soft no. Let's talk about it. Let's make a plan. Let's then try it out in a few locations. But we are surely service-obsessed and then innovation. That's exactly why we're here today to talk about how innovative we have been by partnering with SmartSense to take us into the digital world. Many of our other core principles you can see there, you can find that on our website at your leisure.
But as we circle back to our key requirements for keeping sushi safe, it really is about controlling hazards. Our hazards include receiving raw fish. If you all know what sushi means, then you would know that it means seasoned rice. We can put anything inside of seasoned rice, but I think you would like to have some tuna or salmon or imitation crab inside of that seasoning, right? We also have to deal with pathogenic environmental controls as we go throughout our process, so refrigeration is extremely important to us and in this slide you'll see all of the records that we keep.
And I am here to tell you that SmartSense has helped us go from paper into the digital world. We have customizable logs for each one of these records that we're able to keep on file. In the past, health departments have asked us to keep these records on file on site for 90 days. But because of this technology, we can keep them into the new Millennium because of the digital platforms that we're able to work with. Then we address our concerns by using these different methods.
One in particular I really want to call out is customizable checklists. SmartSense has really created this system in which I can come in and create a checklist based on the characteristics of relationships over the cross of our 400 locations. We have many different business types that we serve, we have some that operate for only four hours a day. We have some that operate for up to 16 hours a day. So, we can customize the types of checklists that are needed. How many times we need to check temperature? Mostly we do that every four hours and we are able to document and capture that through some of the technology tools you see here. We have enabled some Bluetooth-capable temperature probes. And most recently, we've incorporated a Bluetooth-capable pH meter, which is really state-of-the-art and I think is taking our business to a whole nother level.
If you remember when Callin said one of the challenges we faced in the food service world is falsifications or in common language, pencil whipping. When we came to our log books and many times people would even erase it back in the pencil days. Well, now we have these tools that are taking the measurements directly from the instrument directly to our digital platform. And it has just been a game changer for us and I do want to recognize and highlight our operator partner, Giant Eagle. They're here somewhere and they have been leading the way so much so that they have invested millions of dollars with SmartSense. By enabling all of their refrigeration devices with these continuous temperature monitoring assets, and so they can see the temperature at all times in their facilities and they're tied into alarms. They give us real-time reactionary actions.
And so lastly, before I move on to the next slide is I wanted to just share with you that working in the food business, we all realize that things are going to go wrong. Well, I hope you do because it will happen. And when that happens, don't be alarmed. We just need to make effective corrective action. And so what we have done in this system is we have created prescribed correction actions inside of this SmartSense solution. So anytime there's a temperature deviation or pH meter deviation, we already have the correction action there for our end user to put into use. And so, it really has helped our control measures from a corporate standpoint. And as I take my seat, I just wanted to share with you that this has been an integral part of our holistic food safety and quality assurance approach because sushi is considered as a high-risk, we want to make sure that we have absolutely safe food and this is one of the ways that we achieve that. We will do this and enforce it throughout our food safety culture. It goes directly into our training and educational programs, and it makes sure that everyone in our team is committed to providing this food safety through this innovative tool. With that said, I'll pass it back to Guy.
[Guy Yehiav] Thank you so much, Dr. Larry. It's fantastic to get your insights on that complex operations of sushi. The nice thing about it is that I think you can take that to any scaled operation environment in restaurants. It's not just about the pH, but it's about the cohesiveness and the simplicity of a solution that will then automate it. If you have any questions, start preparing it. I have another one or two slides, and then we'll know about answering any questions you may have. So about three weeks ago, we went to a quarterly business review with honeygrow. honeygrow is a great customer of ours as well that has been growing significantly and double up since then. They continue to double up the number of stores in the US and if you didn't visit one of their restaurants, please do. It’s just fantastic to configure and customize your own dish when you go there with very fresh ingredients. But what I really like speaking with JP, who couldn't be here in person this weekend, he said that since they implement our solution, they now create a cohesiveness. And it's a very simple solution that prevent failures and enable new stores to go up really, really quickly and minimize the training period that they need to run through.
On one side, it prevent any freon leakage. From all of their assets and it identify failures way before it actually happens. And so you can train the people in the store. And then, automatically create tickets to technicians that will just proactively, if they are in the area, go and stop in a store and fine tune the assets before it fails. And so what he said is that it was a dream come true because all of the all of the checkpoints that they asked for were actually over delivered through the solution. And obviously we do quarterly business review with all of our customers as part of the partnership. And it's just really great to go and see them and learn about the. ROI from each one of them. When we talk about our customers overall, you can see that a lot of those logos that you see there are trusted brands that you trust when you eat at their establishment or when you actually consume any of the prepackaged food that you buy from them. The nice thing about it is that they trust, therefore, our solution, to prepare all of this food and be able to be away from any risk and reduce overall risk, create barrier efficiencies, better Standard Operating Procedure, better consistency across all of their stores and all of their prepared, packaged foods. I would like to hand it over to any questions that you may have for the esteemed people that we have with us here.
[Question 1] Hello. Does your platform accept HACCP data from other pieces of equipment like ovens and hot holding units.
[Guy Yehiav] That's a great question. I'll answer it first and then I'll hand it over to Callin. The first answer is yes, we actually have what we call coopetition. We actually integrate with our competitor data. We just need to make sure that it's certified on the Bluetooth levels on the different radio frequency or Zigbee or LoRaWAN on the technology. But we can actually read it and load it into our environment or we can integrate using our rest API and therefore create prescriptive action through Standard Operating Procedure. So if you already invested in other technologies, we can help you automate it and bring it back to your people. Callin, anything you want to add?
[Callin Godson-Green] Yeah. For those of you that aren't as techie as Guy, yes, we do. I'm working with a customer, a large grocery chain at the moment, and they basically want to develop a dashboard of all their metrics. So our you know the data that they put into our system being one of which, and then they use like rationales and they were essentially like we want to correlate that. So we're essentially using that open API that Guy mentioned and we have people at the booth from our product team that can do the more techie things if you want. But yes, essentially and we're building it all together so they log into one system and it's all there for it. So that coopetition that Guy mentioned is kind of the novel idea and method of working because essentially my input is that if it's for safe food, it's important, so we can't be saying like, oh, we're not going to deal with those guys. Like you went to a competitor. We need all the information there to make the right decisions at the end of the day, we want safe food.
[Guy Yehiav] We are here to cater to our customers. Any other questions?
[Question 2] What can you share with us about the reduction in food safety incidents? And also about the return on investment with your solution.
[Guy Yehiav] Oh, awesome, awesome questions. So I'll start it and I'll hand it over to you to discuss. But you know from an ROI perspective and number of incidents, what we see when we implement the solution because it's a digitalized solution that creates the visibility to your risks, sometimes you have a J curve. So when you implement a solution like that, if before you're going from pen and paper to digital, you'll see more incidents and so the J curve will actually be more incidents before you're actually getting better. It's very similar to whoever saw the Matrix movie. You take a pill, you get visibility, you say, oh God, I didn't know we have that many issues, but then it takes you through the training and actually get you into a better, safer place than you had before, but Dr. Larry, anything you want to say?
[Dr. Larry Payton] Excellent question by the way. I can't speak to the ROI and the actual dollars, but I will say as a leader of a food safety organization, it gives me the data that I need to be able to deal real-time and effectively directly with the customer for a customer incident or the health department. For example, if I have a small sushi bar in Ashtabula, Ohio that is way out or away from the metro areas and I have a local health department that comes there and for some reason my operator can't effectively display our documentation, I can e-mail that inspector the data right away. I can send them a report for one day, seven days or for the entire month, which in the past I was not able to do. So I would say that it makes your program more holistic and gives your clients and retail partners and restaurant customers more confidence in the way that you're able to do business.
[Guy Yehiav] Thank you. Anything you want to add Callin?
[Callin Godson-Green] Oh, I think that covers it. Your point about the J curve is very true, and I've found that in my food safety life as well. And it's like you almost kind of have a little heart attack when you're like, oh, this system, we've introduced it and now it's causing problems, but it's actually not. They were all there all along. We just didn't know about them. So as you understand the program and the platform and you action and you know, the system learns as well, and like I hate to use this sort of buzzword of AI, but it does take in what you say. So you essentially give it feedback. You say this has gone out of temperature. Oh, the door was open or the cooler or the coil was frozen over, it will adopt that, learn what this was and then maybe the next time you might go out of range, it'll give you that suggestion. Check the door. So if the door was opened because last time it looked like this, that's what's happening. So, definitely beneficial for restaurants.
[Guy Yehiav] To answer just about the investment, we have a small type customers with 1, 2, 3 type restaurants and we may have a large scale environment like Sushic all the way to you know, Walgreens, Walmart and others. And so we tend to know how to work with small, medium, and large in order to enable that and minimize that risk. Looking forward to seeing you at our Booth, 7274, a short walk around the corner and I would like to really thank you, Dr. Larry and the Queen Callin for joining me here today. Thank you.
