Baselines are covered first. The SMART Pre-Shift Inspection Protocol captures data that is essential to operations and inspections (fridge temps, food temps, locations of sanitizing buckets…everything you need for CYA moments and health inspections). But the SMART Pre-Shift Inspection Protocol also collects the seemingly extraneous data that could be far more telling than the fact …
Tommy Yionoulis
I've been in the restaurant industry for most of my adult life. I have a BSBA from University of Denver Hotel Restaurant school and an MBA from the same. When I wasn't working in restaurants I was either doing stand-up comedy, for 10 years, or large enterprise software consulting. I'm currently the Managing Director of OpsAnalitica and our Inspector platform was originally conceived when I worked for one of the largest sandwich franchisors in the country. You can reach out to me through LinkedIn.
“Moneyball approach ” to managing multi-location restaurants
The question is: Which data? What things should our “Moneyball scouts ” be looking at? That’s where SMART Pre-Shift Inspection Protocols come into play. With the SMART Pre-Shift Inspection Protocol, you can leverage your workforce to collect data, which will let you draw correlations between operations, sales, and costs. That will help you determine your shortest path to …
What are SMART Pre-shift Inspections?
At OpsAnalitica, we are big believers that conducting consistent daily inspections drives better operations, safer restaurants, and increases profitability. We are such big believers we have developed our pre-shift inspection methodology, the SMART Pre-Shift Inspection. We will be hosting a 30-minute webinar on SMART Pre-shift inspections on Tuesday July 14th at 3:00 pm central time. Click …
Supreme Court Ruling On Affordable Care Act
With the Supreme Court upholding the Affordable Care Act today the restaurant industry is still looking for some changes to be made as their situation is very different than most businesses. I’ll post a full article from nrn.com on the subject from today. The provisions in the act that cause concern for the restaurant industry …
How to Handle the Press after a Bad Health Inspection
On the OpsAnalitica blog, we have written about this trend of local news stations reporting on restaurant’s health inspection scores. It makes sense for the news stations to do these reports because the data is readily available, it advertises well, it’s easy content to produce, and my guess is that it drives viewership. In Denver, Fox 31, has their restaurant report card segment and website. As we have been following this in the media, we have seen a ton of these restaurant health inspection segments all around the country. If you operate a restaurant in Florida, watch out, they seem to have these reports in every major city.
For the restaurant industry this good and bad. I believe that more transparency around health inspections and health inspection scores puts pressure on the industry to do better, and it increases the restaurant cleanliness standards in that area. When LA moved to letter grades system, one of the results was that there were less foodborne illness cases over time. What they found is that bad letter grades affect revenue, a C resulted in a -1% sales dip and an A resulted in an 5 to 6% increase in sales. The market rewards clean restaurants and punishes dirty ones. We got this data from a grand jury report when Orange County was looking at moving to the letter grade system, click here to see the report.
I also understand the concern of restaurant owners when it comes to making this data public, it affects their business and sometimes it is hard to get a reinspection promptly. I don’t feel bad for restaurant owners that lose revenue for being dirty, they should. I do feel bad for restaurant owners that fixed their issues, but have to wait a considerable amount of time to get reinspected. Counties have to provide the ability to get reinspected very quickly even if they have to charge a convenience fee.
I’ve embedded the Fox 31 report from June 12th in this blog. There are three restaurants mentioned in the report. 2 of the restaurants got F’s, and one got an A. According to the Fox website you have to have 5 critical violations on your last two health inspections to get an F. To get an A you have to have 0 critical violations on your last two health inspections. This video is amazing and shows you how to and how not to handle an inquiry from the media at your restaurant. It is 100% worth watching to see how the Blue Bonnet handled their bad score compared to Chubby’s.
Here are my feelings after watching their segments:
- Chubby’s
- Didn’t answer repeated phone calls – could have been trying to evade reporters
- Manager had face blurred – guilty and wrong
- Written statement that was summarized – too little too late
- Verdict: I probably will never eat at that restaurant after seeing that report. In fairness, I don’t live close to that restaurant so my chances of popping in were low to begin with.
- Blue Bonnet
- Owner got interviewed – She was taking responsibility
- She showed the media her kitchen – open nothing to hide
- She mentioned the all the staff meetings – she took action
- Verdict: I may eat there again in six months or so after they have had a chance to be inspected one more time. In fairness, we used to frequent Blue Bonnet when we lived close by and really like the food.
I hope you find this video helpful in crafting your crisis plan and how you would handle this type of interview. Also, kudos to Johnny Rockets in the Cherry Creek Mall for getting an A, I’ve eaten there several times and will be back.
Operations, Data, & Reporting in Restaurants Part III
Thank you for following this blog series on restaurant operations, data, and reporting. In Tuesday’s post, we discussed BOH data collection and what items you could be tracking that could help you improve operations and run more profitable businesses. To read Tuesday’s post click here. One last thought on BOH operations data collection. A lot …
Operations, Data, & Reporting in Restaurants Part II
Yesterday we explored the importance of operations data, different ways to capture operations data, and where it could be used to make better decisions. If you didn’t see, yesterday’s blog post clicks here. A quick summary of yesterday’s post, the restaurant industry needs to be collecting and analyzing operations data with the easily available register and …
Operations, Data, & Reporting in Restaurants
This week we are going to be doing a deep dive into restaurant operations, data, and reporting in the industry. We are going to be exploring areas of the restaurant business where operators could be collecting more data, what that data could tell them, and strategies to collect data. The restaurant industry as a whole …
How much will minimum wage hikes hurt restaurants?
CBS News posted an article today “How much will minimum wage hikes hurt restaurants?”. They site a Moody’s Investor Services study that took a look at the effect on the industry. They mention in the article that the restaurants are going to have to eat this costs out of their profit. I don’t see that …
Broken Windows Theory For Restaurants
I first heard of Broken Windows Theory in the book Freakonomics. A synopsis of the theory is that there are social norms and expectations of how things are supposed to be. When expectations aren’t met then society reacts poorly by lashing out. The example that is commonly cited is an empty building in a city, if …