Key Benefits

• Summary of all new health inspections on the day they are published.
• Identify and take action on issues that require additional follow-up.
• Improve procedures and training based on identified patterns and trends.

At A&W food safety is a top priority. As part of their overall food safety program they wanted to efficiently track, monitor and respond to issues identified in restaurant health inspections performed by public health inspectors.

With over 700 franchised restaurants spread across numerous health authorities, effectively monitoring all restaurant inspection reports on a real time basis is time consuming to accomplish manually. With health regions posting health inspections online A&W estimated a full-time person would be required to simply locate and log health inspections each day. This manual inspection retrieval would still leave them without a process which would support the analysis and measurement necessary to monitor their food safety performance and make improvements to their food safety practices.

To effectively track, manage and analyze public health inspection data A&W deployed Health Inspection Monitor. With Health Inspection Monitor A&W receives daily summaries of new inspections for each of their restaurants across Canada. “Monitoring and analyzing inspections for all of our restaurants just wouldn’t be feasible without an automated solution. When a health inspection is posted in the public domain, I see it within the first 24 hours it is online.” says Neil Farmer, Director of Operations Excellence at A&W. “The first email I read every morning is my summary of new health inspections, and we are able to react immediately to anything requiring corrective action.”

Since deploying Health Inspection Monitor, A&W has also been able to identify patterns in the health inspections, which has enabled them to be out in front of emerging trends in Health Authority requirements and concerns. “Having this information and being able to sort our results by a number of different criteria has allowed us to be more proactive, and gives us a big head start on creating new processes to further ensure food safety for our customers,” says Farmer.

In a franchise organization information flow between individual restaurants and head office can be a challenge. Health Inspection Monitor “allows us to plug in directly and because we get the data at a corporate level we can respond very quickly to issues. This allows us to help franchisees with solutions or training for any food safety challenges they may be experiencing and has the added benefit of building better relationships with local health authorities who are pleased with how quickly we respond,” says Farmer. “We’ve only had the solution for a few months, but I can’t imagine being without it now.”