Frustrated with manual temperature logs, HAI Hospitality discovered Therma°
Hai Hospitality is an Austin, Texas-based multi-concept restaurant group popularly known for two James Beard Award-Winning chefs: Tyson Cole and Aaron Franklin. Director of Facilities Management Terry Ubl runs their 11 restaurants and plans to open 7 more by next year. Terry always looks to make facilities management easier, more cost-effective, and safer for guests. In the past, Hai Hospitality staff would log temperatures manually four times per day. Moreover, during non-operating hours, he had no way of knowing that food was being stored at safe temperatures. Refrigeration equipment malfunctioned, restaurants lost electricity, and employees sometimes would accidentally leave the walk-in cooler door open for long periods of time.
Terry felt vulnerable. With decades of restaurant operations and facilities management experience, Terry knew the distress of equipment breakdown. He started looking for solutions and discovered Therma while attending an annual facilities management trade show conference.
Impact of Therma°: Improved restaurant food safety and profitability
After a simple 10-minute installation and Therma dashboard training with a dedicated customer success manager, Hai Hospitality set up alerts across all of their restaurants to notify multiple team members of any equipment issues to ensure immediate resolution. Staff adopted Therma quickly and set up recurring automatic reports, which are regularly submitted to Hai’s third-party food safety partner, EcoSure. Therma eliminated temperature logging from Hai’s day-to-day operations and made it easier for general managers to pull reports using the Therma App quickly. Within one month, Terry was able to identify that a lowboy was underperforming after seeing large cyclical spikes and multiple text message alerts. He called in a refrigeration technician to fix the problem. "On just this occasion, Therma° saved us from possibly endangering patrons, $1000 dollars with of food, and downtime", Terry recounts.
When the power goes out, equipment goes down, or someone leaves the door open, Terry and his team are now protected with Therma°.