Taking on Restaurant Food Safety

Food safety compliance is a major challenge for restaurants. Last week we shared our hangout with Erica Obersi of Kitchen Check, a platform to help operators streamline the process. And today, we’re excited to share that two other members of Hack//Dining’s B&B challenge winning team, Jonathan Judge and Margot Belgorod, who are attacking the the problem from a different angle.

The duo has set out to digitize the NYC health department PDF document for food safety regulations by turning it into an easy-to-use checklist app. They say this rubric provides helpful information for operators, but it’s difficult to find and it’s buried under a lot of legal jargon.

Progress

After talking with restaurants, the pair says they received overwhelming feedback to focus on mobile first. So the developer and designer team decided to build a food safety regulation checklist mobile app for restaurants. They are tackling NYC first and hope to expand in the future. Their goal is to create an MVP over the next few months.

Needs

Jonathan and Margot would love to hear from restaurants about their health inspection experiences. What caught you off guard? What are your recurring challenges with the process? They want to hear all of your health department stories, the good, the bad and the ugly. Jonathan says the operators they’ve talked with so far have said, “Just tell me what to do…Give me everything I need so I can be as prepared as possible when inspection day happens.” Any feedback they receive from the community will only help them build a more comprehensive app that will do just that. So if you have stories or feedback, please email nina [at]foodtechconnect[dot].com.

Learn all about how they plan to make the check list easy to use in the video below.

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.