Measuring hygiene in central kitchens

Using central kitchens as a use case, Dr.Rachna Dave, Founder & CEO, MicroGO LLP, illustrates how hygiene can be monitored and enforced at every step, using the GOsmart platform.

In the 2018 Oxford Dictionary, ‘Hygiene’ is defined as ‘conditions or practices conducive to maintaining health and preventing disease, particularly through cleanliness’. As the definition implies, hygiene is more than just cleaning; it entails a multifaceted approach that ultimately leads to achieving true hygienic conditions for maintaining health and preventing diseases.

Personal hygiene, water and raw material hygiene, utensil and equipment hygiene, and finally, hygiene in storage and transportation of cooked food are all important considerations in the food manufacturing and processing industry. Failure to maintain the desired hygiene level in any of these aspects may affect the final product and, eventually, customer trust. When an industry operates multiple kitchens, another level of complexity is added to this setup. This necessitates technological innovation to overcome these constraints. We at MicroGO underwent a thorough understanding of all of these constraints and pioneered the work on ‘digital hygiene’.

Let’s consider a central kitchen as an example of a use case. The SOP entails that the kitchen staff performs hand and footwear hygiene before entering a clean area. They perform this using GOassure^TMLITE and GOclean^TM+, respectively. The former assures 20 seconds of hand hygiene with six steps aligned with the attendance monitoring system. This assures both attendance and hygiene SOP at the entrance. The act by which they are supposed to perform is also recorded.

GOpure^TM+ detects and maintains total residual oxidant (TRO) levels, i.e., 0.2 ppm in process water. GOpure+ is MicroGO’s in-line chlorine dioxide dosing and monitoring system built on our patented Tubelet^TM platform. Operations such as fresh produce disinfection are monitored in conjunction and facilitated by GOpure^TM200.

Similarly, GOassure^TMMAX provides intermittent hand hygiene during the eight-hour shift. Not only does this product provide 40 seconds of hand hygiene (cleansing-drying-sanitisation), but it also alarms and monitors hand hygiene at hourly intervals. Similarly, disinfection is measured for other operations such as chopping boards, vessels and cutleries for both non-vegetarian and vegetarian uses.

GOpure^TM300 is a dry sterilisation technology used to avoid cross-contamination via mops and surface wipes. Temperature and humidity must be optimal for raw materials or finished goods to be stored to avoid spoilage or nutritional loss. When the specified conditions are not met, GOsmart^TMTH measures the set values in real time and alarms when the conditions are not met.

All of these devices are IoT enabled, and they collect and send data to a central dashboard for a single or multiple facilities’ hygiene or quality managers. On a daily, weekly, monthly, or yearly basis, the hygiene manager can generate statistics and reports for internal or external audits. Another advantage of the GOsmart^TM platform is that it is open-ended. This enables our customers who already have their SOPs and equipment in place and would like to collaborate with us solely on the technology side.

GOsmart represents a quantum leap forward in the hygiene space, encompassing not only the ‘right science’, but also allowing our customers to ‘measure’ hygiene. In the following series, we will look at how businesses are utilising data obtained through GOsmart^TM for operational sustainability and how this ecosystem is also achieving environmental sustainability.