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Energy Focus

August 08 - Fast Food

Fast food has become a bit of a misnomer: associated with burgers and chips, it equally applies to a host of other quick, easy to serve meals. Quick service is a more accurate description. It can be prepared quickly and covers a wider range from fries to salads, burgers to baguettes. Full article ...

WEEE

Advice to Final Users

WEEE stands for Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment. The legislation took effect from 1st July 2007 and states that, under certain circumstances, the final user of a piece of electrical or electronic equipment (EEE) can get it collected and recycled at no charge at the end of its life. Full article ...

Energy Bar

Temperature monitoring can deliver significant benefits in terms of energy efficiency, by ensuring that your equipment is performing correctly. For example, a freezer or refrigerator that is working at too low a temperature may be keeping the food safe, but it's also wasting energy. A temperature monitoring system will warn of this issue so staff can adjust the equipment.

Some monitoring systems can also warn if a piece of equipment is about to breakdown, so that you can call in a service engineer before failure occurs. This not only saves downtime, it also reduces stress in the kitchen.

 

Temperature Monitoring

If only they could talk…

Wouldn't it be great if, instead of you having to check it, your fridge could tell you all was well? Or if your combi could warn you if something was wrong?

Temperature monitoring is a requirement for many caterers, as part of their HACCP procedures. Keeping a close check on all the different critical food areas is not only time consuming, it's also a job that's easy to overlook. So automatic temperature monitoring clearly makes sense. Instead of that tedious checking, all staff have to do is glance at a PC monitor.

What's more, the tightening Food Laws are making record keeping increasingly complex, and hand-written records are not only inefficient and time-consuming, they are prone to error, easily neglected and are potentially unreliable as a ‘due diligence’ defense at law. An automated system lowers costs, by saving staff time, and makes HACCP procedures easier to operate. Moreover, the system can generate all the records needed in a concise, secure and accurate format.

If the monitored equipment's temperature varies from the set parameters, the system can alert staff so they can investigate and make any necessary adjustments or call for an engineer.

The result is easier compliance with food safety regulations and peace of mind that the food is in perfect condition.

Systems are available that use wireless technology and hand-held PDAs to download the data. Many can also be extended to other kitchen tasks and routines, offering a complete monitoring solution for areas such as temperature, humidity, cleaning schedules, inventory control and staff training, and making it easier to achieve HACCP compliance.

Not all temperature risks in the kitchen involve keeping food stored or held at correct temperatures. There is also a need to probe food samples at various production stages such as goods in, and after cooking and chilling and reheating. Some temperature monitoring systems are available with logging thermometers that enable user, location, food item, time, temperature and corrective action (where necessary) to be logged automatically. This can eliminate another major area of paper records from the kitchen, since data from these thermometers can be downloaded to the log on the PC.

Nor are these systems aimed solely at big kitchens. Small operations need to comply with food safety regulations just as much as the big chains, so several manufacturers have created systems specifically designed for the independent owner operator.

At the other end of the scale are multi-site systems that use the latest technologies and software to integrate an entire group's operations, allowing centralised monitoring and recording.

Because it's good to talk….

So far, so good. The only problem is that the various systems usually can't talk to each other, because they don't use the same language. In the USA the North American Association of Food Equipment (NAFEM) has developed a data protocol called NDP (NAFEM Data Protocol) that overcomes this problem and allows equipment and systems to talk to each other.

CESA is currently developing a similar protocol for manufacturers of equipment for the UK. This has the aim of standardising the language used by equipment control systems and will hopefully serve to further improve the integration of technologies in the kitchen.