Somerville College goes digital with food safety checks
About Somerville College
Somerville College Oxford
Somerville College is one of the University of Oxford's prestigious colleges. It is one of the first colleges to accept women students and was founded in 1879.
Daily meals are provided to students, fellows and visitors The college also hosts events and conferences. The catering and events department is headed up by Dave Simpson who is passionate about providing amazing quality food at the College.
The Challenge
Somerville College already had a 5 star rating and a bespoke food safety management system. However, they wanted to take their food safety practices to the next level with digital recording of food safety checks.
Dave, the catering and events manager, is always keen to save time, and make the day to day running of the kitchen more efficient for Paul, his head chef and the whole kitchen team.
“Having the digital diary in place also saves valuable work hours for both the service and chef teams within my department. My team can enter the data on a hand held device rather than on paper sheets saving them valuable time that can then be spent working on their main duties of preparing and serving of meals.”
The Benefits
Food Safety Logic’s digital diary provides Somerville College with instant access to their monitoring checks.
They can upload pictures and input data on any device to help ensure they are making safe food. These due diligence checks will always be to hand so one less thing to worry about during inspections or audits.
“The digital system means that I can access all the data being imputed by my team at any time. This is very
beneficial when the EHO visits or when we have our internal audit as everything is in one place whereas previously they would have to ask to see our manual logs for all the areas covered.
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The Solution
A web app available from any device developed in collaboration with environmental health officers and insights from chefs. It has been designed to elevate food safety practices and is available for a small monthly or annual fee.
The app can be made bespoke by adding cleaning checks, suppliers, target temperatures etc. It is suitable for single or multi site businesses and can be branded up with the business logo if required.
“The Digital Kitchen diary is an easy to use app which has all the daily checks we need including the function to add photos. All my team have logins so they update the information and I can check everything has been done even when I am not there!
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The Result
Somerville College are using the digital kitchen diary in their large busy kitchen and servery. Paul the head chef has noticed the positive impact it has had including ‘no more missing bits of paper or misplaced files. ‘
“The digital kitchen diary app is money well spent and has helped us get to get our paperwork more organised and secure as everything is stored in the cloud.
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