MonikaPrime saves £15,000 of stock

MonikaPrime is a cloud-based food safety suite that can keep equipment temperatures safe as well as improving efficiency and reducing risk to staff in these difficult times. The Equipment Management module monitors unit temperatures continuously by collecting data from sensors installed among the food within a cabinet. The sensors simulate the temperature of the food and trigger alarms when this moves out of safe range. Food can therefore be moved before it spoils and needs to be discarded.

Heriot Watt University has been using Monika for more than twenty years, and recently upgraded to MonikaPrime, which gives Executive Head Chef Jamie Jack visibility of all refrigerated units across the campus from a mobile device.

In May this year, at the height of the lockdown and while no staff were on site, the system identified that there was a problem with the catering store walk-in freezer. Jamie was therefore able to arrange engineers to attend, where they found both compressors were failing. One had a gas leak and the other had tripped due to increased demand as a result of the leak. Jamie explained: “The two faults were quickly rectified, saving us not only the headache of having to empty such a large freezer but also saving in the region of £15,000 worth of stock being held in it…Having the Monika system has certainly paid for itself over and over again throughout the years!”

Ensuring food storage temperatures are safe is critical in order to avoid food-borne illness and the terrible business consequences that follow. However, a manual temperature recording system will involve staff visiting numerous pieces of equipment and writing down their temperatures several times a day. Not only is this time-consuming and prone to error – but it carries a greater risk to staff from potentially contaminated surfaces and the need to repeatedly move around a busy environment.

Monika sensors can be set flexibly with wide critical temperature limits for lower risk foods and narrow limits for higher risk items such as sea food. An alarm escalation system ensures management are made aware of urgent issues not dealt with in the kitchen, and alerts can be received remotely. Monika can also install other sensors e.g. to identify if a door has been left open too long or how a compressor is running to ensure timely maintenance and to save energy.

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