Ever have your Uber Eats meal arrive at your front door, only to find that, after waiting 40 minutes and upon prying off the container lids, your hot food is now cold? Sure you could microwave it, but it’s never an appetizing discovery especially when you’re famished and looking forward to stuffing your face with your favorite Pad See Ewe noodles immediately.
Unlike Domino’s Pizza which outfits each of its delivery drivers with insulated bags that keep their pizzas at that ideal hot temperature, most gig economy delivery drivers working for, say, DoorDash or Grubhub, aren’t equipped with anything to store your take-out order except the messy backseat of their car that’s littered with crushed cans of RedBull and discarded Kleenex. Talk about food handling!
Even most meal kit delivery drivers – yes the ones that charge you an exorbitant membership fee for microwaveable meals that come packed in gel packs – contract with third-party delivery fleet companies. These third-party delivery services in turn hire your average Jane or Joe with their average medium-sized sedan to cover delivery routes, which oftentimes are hundreds of miles.
The concept of ‘a la minute’ cooking means that food is made to order, and that’s the reality of restaurant establishments: they receive your take-out order, and a line cook immediately fires off your dishes, piping hot. Then, the food gets packed into biodegradable containers, and sits on the counter, waiting for the delivery driver to pick it up. If you’re lucky, the driver isn’t too far away. But who knows, right? It could be another 25-minute ride for that driver to arrive. Then they speed off with your food and hopefully don’t hit traffic. Or maybe there’s another order that’s near your location, so they decide to kill two birds with one stone, in which case, you hope yours is the first drop-off.
My point is: with gig economy drivers, your food’s sitting, steaming itself to death, and losing vital heat by the minute. By the way, those third-party delivery companies are concerned about logistics and the last mile, and not so much with food safety.
What’s worse is there’s this Time Temperature Danger Zone that all restaurants, cooks, and anyone concerned with food safety should know: bacteria’s favorite temperature to rapidly multiply is anywhere between 40 to 140 °F (4 to 60 °C). Pathogens stored in this range can mushroom and cause serious foodborne illness (Centers for Disease Control). Ever eat something that seemed okay but then you came down with stomach cramps, nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, and a fever? The only way in which this can be prevented is careful cold chain management: constant monitoring and logging of proper temperatures. Alas, companies like GrubHub, UberEats, and DoorDash don’t have strict policies for this. They are simply the middleman circumventing the local public health authorities, and should you ever get food poisoning, you’re liable to mistakenly accuse the restaurant instead.
With a FoodSpot micro store, your food is kept at a safe temperature, and every food item you sell is inventoried by a smart sticker that tracks the expiration of that individual item. We make it simple to maintain high quality freshness.
If you’re turning green right about now and feeling nauseated, I don’t blame you. Time Temperature Danger Zone and food safety is something FoodSpot enjoys circumventing with our smart technology.
We take cold chain management seriously: in our unattended microstores, there’s a digital readout of the machine’s refrigerated temperature that’s sent in real-time to our operator’s Dashboard every minute. Should any fluctuations occur, say, in the event of a black-out or someone trips up the power cord, an alert is sent immediately to the owner-operator of their FoodSpot micro store, and they can quickly respond. Not only that but should the fridge temperature go beyond your desired setting for more than ten minutes, a text and email message are automatically sent out. That way, the carefully prepared products held in a FoodSpot micro store are never compromised unnecessarily, and customers can rest assured that they are receiving the freshest food available.
Our FoodSpot team understands that, as foodservice professionals, food safety and food quality go hand-in-hand. So save those delivery fees and give smart vending a try!
