In the aftermath of high-visibility foodborne illness outbreaks during the past 18 months, some restaurant chains are achieving enhanced food safety or improved crisis communications by leveraging technology that might not immediately come to mind for those purposes.
The Web-based Instill Quality & Compliance Management system being used by the Subway chain’s Independent Purchasing Cooperative, or IPC, is one such technology, as is the GroupCast LLC voice-messaging tool being used by Cheyenne, Wyo.-based Taco John’s.
Miami-based IPC is controlled by operators of more than 22,000 franchised Subway restaurants in the United States, Puerto Rico and Canada. IPC deployed the Instill software and service over a six-month period in 2005.
Citing an example of how the system can drive food safety, Rick Buttner, IPC director of quality and purchasing, said it recently quickly highlighted “complaints that some products were delivered way outside of the acceptable temperature range.”
Within 24 hours, “we found out where the breakdown had occurred with that refrigerated truck, and we had the entire cold section redelivered,” he said. “When we do have a problem, we can focus in on the [manufacturing] plant, the [production] line having the problem and even the time of production.”
Such traceback capabilities often are cited by public-health officials as necessary to comprehensive food safety.
According to Instill, IQ&CM software is designed to efficiently aggregate and analyze supply chain information for the purposes of early detection of product quality problems, the formulation of action plans related to those problems and the tracking of compliance with those plans.
For improved accuracy in data collection and ease of use by IPC’s thousands of Subway operators and cooperative owners, IPC is executing IQ”CM using a call center rather than a reporting website or e-mail. Buttner said call center agents are trained to efficiently coax key information from franchisees and help them find important details on invoices and packaging.
“High-severity complaints [logged into the system] pop up on e-mail [to IPC officials],” he said. “In the past, it might have taken days, if not weeks, to see these problems.”
To work, the IQ&CM strategy requires that an operator-user’s distributor and manufacturer trading partners provide access to product and production information.
“When I receive e-mails from suppliers who have put teams together to solve [product or distribution] problems before they have even come to my attention, that’s a marvelous thing,” Buttner said of how some trading partners leverage information aggregated or generated by the system.
Instill said IQ&CM users pay a basic subscription fee of $3,000 per month. Fees increase if unit-level users are given direct access to the system or if additional departments within a corporation, such as finance, are licensed to use the technology, the vendor indicated.
A food safety problem already had been detected late last year when franchisor Taco John’s International Inc. used GroupCast’s phone-based messaging system to keep the 230 operators of 400-plus franchised Taco John’s restaurants updated about the E. coli O157:H7 outbreak. In December three Taco John’s restaurants in Iowa and Minnesota were implicated in an E. coli outbreak that sickened at least 50 people and that later was associated by public-health agencies with contaminated lettuce.
For a monthly subscription fee of between $150 to $500, dependent on the number of individuals on a “to call” list, and a 15-cents-per-minute charge per call placed, GroupCast users can phone a prerecorded message to hundreds or thousands of individuals in a matter of minutes, if not seconds. An offset equal to the monthly subscription fee is applied to the per-minute charges run up by a user in any given month.
“It was incredibly valuable to us to reassure our franchise partners in the face of an unexpected issue and tragedy,” Brian Dixon, Taco John’s vice president of marketing, said about GroupCast. “It enabled us to get a message out to people quickly and comprehensibly and to tie them into a conference call.”
Update messages and invitations to conference calls were sent using the GroupCast system and e-mail, he said.
“The fact is we have a hard time keeping track of e-mail addresses, because people are now [changing them] to dodge spam and regularly change service providers,” Dixon said of why two communications methods were used.
Dixon said Taco John’s call list included the work, cell and home phone numbers for franchisees, their unit managers and TJI corporate personnel.