Supermarket Industry Food Safety Specialists Rely on DataTrac ‘powered by EyeOn®’ for Inspection and Evaluation of Client Sites 

About Watch-Gard
Watch-Gard Systems provides supermarkets with a program called IFSSM, or Integrated Food Safety and Sanitation Management. An integral part of this program are regular visual inspections and evaluations, or audits, which thoroughly evaluate all food safety and sanitation conditions, identifying critical factors that can affect the quality, safety, and freshness of foods being sold at their facilities. These critical factors include personal hygiene of workers, time and temperature control of perishable products, and the growth and/or cross-contamination of bacteria in food preparation areas.
“Certified Watch-Gard sanitation specialists visit supermarkets and perform food safety audits,” said Bill Cohen, Operations Director of Watch-Gard. “We inspect nearly 300 stores on a routine basis and provide detailed evaluations of many aspects of safety and sanitation of the store.” Watch-Gard sanitation specialists take the information gathered during their inspection and print an on-site summary report to review with store personnel and management. This information is also uploaded to a password-protected Web site, where it can be retrieved by designated corporate personnel.

Traditionally, food safety inspectors visit a facility, and provide detailed reports of what they find. These reports are then reviewed by many supervisors both locally and regionally, however often they are written by hand, and as such are hard to read. “When inspection reports are written by hand, many factors are left in the hands of the reporter,” said Cohen. “This means that factors such as handwriting, word choice, grammar, and other seemingly small factors can really make a difference in a report that a client receives from one sanitation specialist versus another.” Bill Cohen started looking into automated options that would allow Watch-Gard’s sanitation specialists to inspect facilities and give reports to customers without any “human error”.

The Solution
Bill Cohen discovered DataTrac ‘powered by EyeOn®’, a customizable, hand-held inspection tool with a web-based centralized reporting and data-analysis engine. “Thanks to DataTrac, Watch-Gard systems is an industry leader, providing the most progressive program of supermarket sanitation available,” said Cohen. The system, ‘powered by EyeOn®’ allows Watch-Gard to send its sanitation specialists into the field with hand-held devices using the Q-Trac system, which allow them to capture, analyze and report on specific conditions within any supermarket they inspect. They are given a pre-determined list of inspection responses, which means that there is no ambiguity as to a status of a certain supermarket. No matter who the inspector is, there are standard responses that are given to the customer, which has “really given us an even more professional image,” said Cohen. While Watch-Gard’s sanitation specialists carry hand-held printers with them to give immediate summary reports, they also take the information that they gather using the Q-Trac system and upload it to the Internet, where Watch-Gard customers can view and optionally download detailed activity reports from the Web Portal, ‘powered by EyeOn®’.
“Thanks to DataTrac, we can provide our customers with a level of service that none of our competitors can,” said Cohen. “From capturing electronic inspection data to centralized Web-based reports, DataTrac does it all.”