Tackling Restaurant Food Safety

Restaurant food safety compliance can be a nightmare. So we are excited to share the progress of one promising project that came out of Hack//Dining, which aims to streamline the process. We talked with Erica Obersi of the B&B challenge winning team, KitchenCheck (check out the team’s final pitch video here), a software program that described itself as the TurboTax of food safety regulations. The program aims to simplify restaurant food safety compliance by making it easy to find the regulations that apply to your food business, maintenance checklists and expert advice, and it also offers a community forum.

In the spirit of Hack//Dining‘s mission to drive open innovation, we have been hostingGoogle+ Hangouts with all of the winning teams. Our goal is to showcase their hacks and share their lessons learned and requests for resources and feedback.

Progress

Obersi has has made major progress on the project since Hack//Dining. KitchenCheck’s initial landing page is up and running, which you can view here. She’s been getting feedback from restaurateurs and building out maintenance checklists.

If you’re a restaurant operator interested in simplifying food safety compliance, you can sign up to be notified when the beta version launches. 

Needs

In the mean time, Obersi is looking for restaurants and food businesses to join KitchenCheck’s beta testing group. She’s also hoping to crowdsource kitchen inspection checklists from restaurants, which will help her develop a kick-ass, comprehensive inspection list for KitchenCheck users. Finally, feedback from developers and designers is most welcome. So if you’re interested in sharing information or resources email Obersi at kitchenchecker[at]gmail[dot]com.

Obersi is gung ho about bringing the product to market.”Information is power, and we need to make this DOH inspection process transparent and easy to understand,” she says.