Inside Food Safety Ep. 3 | A $20,000 Alert: How One Notification Saved a Restaurant

Walk-In Talk Podcast - Carl Fiadini

A Tampa Club chef avoided a $20,000 loss when an automated cooler alert detected a refrigeration leak. The system, installed just days prior, triggered a timely response that saved inventory and prevented food safety risks.

Key takeaways

• Automated monitoring prevents major financial loss from equipment failure.
• Technology reduces human error in food safety compliance.
• Proactive systems improve guest trust and brand reputation.

Transcript preview

Food Safety doesn't begin with the thermometer. It begins with culture. Today we're taking inside food safety out of the studio and into one of Tampa's Premier Private Clubs, The Tampa Club. We're sitting down inside the kitchen with Executive Chef Thomas Mandzick, whose team serves hundreds of members and guests while balancing precision, consistency, hospitality, and food safety every single day. This isn't a conversation about inspections. It's a conversation about standards. What does food safety actually look like inside a professional kitchen? experienced chefs build systems their teams can trust and why has technology become an essential part of delivering safe consistent food every service. Joining us is Chef Thomas Manjick alongside Eric Moore from Testo North America as we connect the science of food safety with the realities of running a busy professional kitchen This is inside food safety brought to you by testo North America. Let's get into it gentlemen Eric chef welcome to the program. Thank you for having me So on the last segment that we did, Eric, we had a great time and it was a terrific episode. You left off on monitoring, automated monitoring. And one of the reasons that we have Chef Thomas on the call today is literally this. Software matters and software can save you money. It's a huge, huge gamble in today, is literally this. Software matters and software can save you money. It's a huge, huge gamble in today's day and age not to have. automated monitoring systems inside of your restaurant. And I want to jump right into what happened because, and by the way, we are at Tampa Club. We are on the 41st floor. I'm staring out the window. It's a beautiful Tampa Day and I'm just staring at Tampa Bay, man. It's a terrific, terrific place to be. Thomas, I need you to tell this story, man. Monday I was off and I'm hanging up the house and I get an alert that is no. me that my cooler is not running properly upstairs. I call my chef and I said hey you know check the cooler real quick and it doesn't seem like it's running right and okay chef give me a second goes in there no no we're fine and I said I'm gonna you're gonna have to give me about 20 minutes and I'm gonna call you back but be ready because you're probably gonna have to pull everything out because we are closed a half day we don't do dinner. So I end up calling the the air conditioning company, they come out. And I said, I really need you to come look at this. And I call back my chef and said, take everything out of there. Because I'm seeing numbers that I don't like on the system that we just got installed from Testo a week before. They are changing the entire roof upstairs. So what they did on Spinnung to us is they moved all of the cooler equipment, the wires, the tubing and all that, all that got moved by a company overnight. Well, unfortunately, they were, they were, was a small little pierced hole into the Freon and then started creating this micro leak as you know the technician told me. So we were able to react to that and save all the product that was in there because we would have all left or they would have all left at three o'clock and he said by nine ten o'clock that night this this cooler would have been dead and and just for giggles. What's an average dollar amount that's sitting inside of a... a walk-in cooler at any given time. Well on average you know through an inventory or something like that especially a place like this where you see the beautiful view you know the space is limited so from there you know our walking upstairs is is you know Montana in terms of all the stuff that we need to bring up here and hold so you're probably looking at 15 to 18,000 dollars. Eric. Let me just set the picture a little bit a week ago was our 200th episode a celebration party here at Tampa Club. Aaron. Congratulations by the way. Yes, thank you. That's pretty awesome. Sorry I missed the party. I know you wanted to be here. I do know that and you know unfortunately the timing wasn't there but Aaron was here and Aaron was setting up this system that morning. So like the timing on this is spectacular. But what I mean so you being you what do you have to say about this? Well, you know, I mean first and foremost that was like music to my ears. That is one of the key. messages that I, you know, the rest of our team, Aaron being included, you know, we try to weave into conversations is inventory loss avoidance because this system, when it's programmed and functioning properly, provides you early warnings that something's amiss, right? Something's off as Chef Thomas indicated, like what he was seeing was different than what somebody was was actually physically experiencing when they walked into the refrigerator. Like the data was telling you like this isn't working right? Because you get this alert, you can respond and do exactly what his team did by relocating everything. It's awesome. It really really is fantastic and super fortunate, I think, you know, that it got put in the just before something like that happened. Yeah, we definitely dodged a major bullet, but at the same time. the reward of being proactive in having the system in play. I'm 40 miles away sitting there, you know, watching a top chef on Netflix and I'm getting this alert and I think, you know, the other part of that too is, you know, obviously you want to trust your staff and you know, have them on it. But having this system in there going, no, there is a problem and not somebody just putting their hand in there and saying, man, I think it's okay. You know, that takes all that equation out of it Let me say this. The modern kitchen is so entirely different than it was just a few years ago. And