Market of Choice Drives Food Safety Compliance in its Grocery Stores and Central Kitchen with SmartSense

 
Market of Choice improves the consistency and compliance of its food safety operations by digitizing logs, checklists, and monitoring across stores and its central kitchen. Using SmartSense as their centralized platform, they gain real-time visibility, reduce errors, and improve productivity while maintaining rigorous FDA standards.

My name is Kyle Trimp. I work for Market of Choice and I'm the Food Safety and Quality Assurance Manager. We have 12 stores and a central kitchen. My role is to ensure compliance with the regulators at each of these facilities. So store level, we do food safety audits. Quarterly, we make sure that we're doing the logs properly. And then at the central kitchen, it is much more of a full program. FDA regulated, so we have to make sure that all of the T's are crossed and I's are dotted, making sure that we're in full compliance with the FDA. So we have a laundry list of checklists and logs that we need to maintain, do verification, we do additional swabbing, making sure allergens and sanitation controls are in place. Some of the challenges are just basically log completion. Having people not pencil-whip the logs, that's huge, right?

We have found that being able to use the dashboard for SmartSense allows us to view the completion at the time that they're doing it. We can also monitor that every single day. We can look back on previous day, previous week, see what has been completed, see some trends, what's going on here. Are there areas that we can improve on? And then we can nail down and see what the root cause of that is. On paper logs, it's a lot harder to do because something like a cooling log where they can just go back, it's like 3 hours later, and they can write in that two-hour temperature. With a system like SmartSense, they're not able to do that. It really drives home the need for that compliance and that strict structure that is needed for a facility like ours. Cooling log is probably one of the best examples of that, just because we have that timer counting down, we get the time stamps in there for every product.

And through a system like SmartSense, we found, okay, we don't need to be leaving all of this stuff in the blast trailer for two hours before pulling it out. We'll pull it out at 30 minutes and a lot of our stuff is already cooled. That increases productivity. So it's really multifaceted on how SmartSense helps us out. Things like label verification checklists. We've built that out for each department in the central kitchen. So they are going through that, making sure that products aren't slipping through the cracks that have, you know, one thing on the front and a completely different product label on the back. So we have checklists built out for each room where they verify each label. We have the labeling team who does that prior and it's built in redundancies. where that allows us to really make sure that we're not sending out mislabeled product, which is the number one reason for recalls in the United States.

When we implemented SmartSense, we were coming from paper logs like everybody else. Having the immediate feedback from digital is really helpful. Paper logs, you're not getting that immediate feedback. It takes a day, it takes a week to get that paper log to wherever it needs to go, and then you need to comb through it. So we can search for the errors, we can see on the dashboard we had this many missed tasks, and hopefully it's zero.

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If we lose a bank of frozen ice cream, it doesn't take long for that to be a spoilage and it's 60, 70, $80,000 in a heartbeat. We typically have multiple saves every year from being notified that we have an issue with one of our frozen cases, one of our refrigerated cases. We're able to take swift and immediate action to remedy that because we're notified. And that's something we did not have before.

Dana Glade, Director of Operations

Jerry's Enterprises

We're using SmartSense for the remote temperature monitoring solution, and prior to that, we had a large population doing manual temperature checks. So now with the technology and the digital solution, we're able to automate that, take the manual step away, and feel confident that our cases and our products are being monitored, but also have the confidence that if something goes wrong, our people are going to be alerted, they can address it timely. 

Mike Least, Food Safety Quality Assurance Systems Director

Wegmans