Digital Food Safety

Overview

We helped restaurants swap clipboards and coffee-stained checklists for a digital app that made food safety as easy (and unskippable) as scrolling TikTok. I led product for a mobile-first tool that replaced pen-and-paper compliance routines with something fast, flexible, and actually used.

Problem(s)

Before this app, restaurant staff were using paper logs to track temperature checks, sanitation routines, and other safety tasks. In theory, this worked. In practice, it meant:

• Lost sheets

• Fudged numbers

• And checkboxes mysteriously filled out before the day even started

Compliance mattered—especially for larger brands—but the tools made it feel like a chore. It was time to drag food safety into the 21st century.

Approach

We embedded with actual restaurant teams to understand their workflows (and how they really got things done during rushes). The takeaway? If the tool wasn’t fast and foolproof, it wouldn’t get used. Period.

We designed a mobile app that:

• Prompted teams through daily checklists

• Automatically timestamped entries and who logged them

• Flagged issues for managers

• Automatically captured equipment temperature via bluetooth thermometers

• Worked with a Bluetooth thermometer to capture temperatures over freehand entry

• Worked offline for those kitchens with spotty Wi-Fi

Build

• A mobile app for staff to complete and track required tasks, like temp checks and cleaning routines

• Manager dashboards to view completion rates, flagged issues, and trends over time

• Custom configuration tools for brands to set their own rules and routines

• Roles/Permissions to restrict certain views

We made it scalable across locations, roles, and even franchise models—all while keeping the experience lightweight enough for a high school kid on his first shift to understand.

Result

• Completion rates over 80%

• Corporate teams could finally see compliance data in real time

• Managers reported catching and fixing more issues before they became costly

• Staff adoption held steady—because it actually fit into the flow of their day

Lesson(s)

Competition isn’t always another app—it can be a Sharpie and a stack of paper. This project showed me that a great product isn’t always flashy and complex like I had thought (this was by first product). If you can replace something annoying with something simple, you’ve probably built the right thing. It also taught me the importance of implimenting accountability into software, as people took food safety way more seriously when they knew someone could check at any time.