Monitoring of food temperature is mandatory in the majority of countries and applies to any organisation that stores, prepares or delivers food for human consumption in the public or private sectors. Bodies such as the Foods Standards Agency, Environmental Health, and the Health & Safety Executive all have powers to demand records of temperature recording and calibration which legally must be made every hour on a 24/7 basis.
With recent talk in by Governments and the press over issues relating the "corporate responsibility", negligence and accountability all need to be aware of the consequence of an incident where due diligence cannot be proven with respect to "food chain management". Keeping accurate temperature records as part of your HACCP programme is both a legal requirement and is an investment in an insurance policy against the real possibility that one day the unthinkable happens that a customer or member of staff falls ill or even worst dies, as a consequence of the way food has been stored or handled.
The cruel fact is that if you cannot prove how you have stored the food you could carry the blame! Similarly those further up the food chain can also pass the responsibility back to you if they know that you are unable to defend your position!
At Radio-Tech, we have been involved in food temperature safety monitoring for over a decade in the industrial food manufacturing process, in transportation, storage, preparation and point of sale. As a consequence, we have developed a range of wireless probes, sensors, PC interfaces and Wireless data loggers dedicated to food chain management. Some are designed for installation directly within chillers and refrigeration units and others are supplied with probes on the end of cables for insertion through the walls and between door seals of freezers. We also have a range of patented devices that are dedicated to open display cabinets that effectively measure both the core and surface temperature of a simulated produce making this device ideal for sandwich bars, delicatessens where exposure to direct sunlight or localised surface heating from lighting can be a major problem.
To compliment this range of wireless sensors, we have also developed a number of software suites that log the data either locally on a PC or remotely via the Internet. For the latter, we offer a hosting service that offers off site storage of data, eliminating need for PC's in the food preparation/storage area. Using this system the data can be viewed by a simple web browser and reports can be exported in CSV format on demand.