“We love hearing these stories from our customers. Read on to see how Howler Hotdogs have used Safe Food Pro to streamline their Food Safety processes...
We’re a family owned food manufacturing business based in Christchurch. We manufacture Howler Hotdogs, the #1 hotdog brand in New Zealand.
We’ve been looking for a cloud based software solution to allow us to move our Customised Food Control Plan from a paper based to a digital platform for some time.
I went out again recently to see if there had been any developments since I last searched. The most commonly recommended product by other manufacturers was a product that would have cost us $500 a month and when I trialled it it felt very “clunky”, would have required a lot of training and support for our team to get up and running with it, and would have needed ongoing support to make modifications as we grew the business. Our food technologist recommended we look at a product she had come across recently that was designed for cafes and restaurants but appeared to have all the features we were looking for. This is how we came across Safe Food Pro!
A quick trial of Safe Food Pro showed it was very intuitive to use. I would describe myself as having “intermediate level” computer skills and was able to get it up and running myself using the online tutorials and support provided by Sophie from the Safe Food Pro team.
8 weeks in I’m absolutely delighted with how Safe Food Pro is performing for us. It’s given us a whole new level of insights and ease of monitoring how our Food Control Plan is performing. Stand out features for us are:
- The ability to add remote monitoring of our freezers and chillers to the system - we now have 24/7 access to temperature readings, even when we are away from the site, and have been able to set up alerts for when temperatures are out of range. This has significantly reduced the risk of product loss with all our finished goods being frozen.
- The level of customisation available with forms - all our existing paper based forms have been easily loaded including Pest Monitoring, Cleaning Schedules, Incident Reports and Customer Complaints.
- The Dashboard – it allows us to see what forms have been completed, by who, and what paperwork is still outstanding from our daily, weekly and monthly cycle of tasks so we are able to address this immediately. This has significantly reduced the amount of chasing up of paperwork we previously used to spend time on.
- Running the forms off a tablet – we’ve set up our forms so the team just have check boxes to complete to sign off on tasks. This is so easy that even those with low levels of computer literacy are easily able to complete their paperwork.
- Audit friendly - our auditor was on site recently, and though we were still in the implementation phase, she commented that two of her other clients had it operating in their businesses and she had found it made her job so much easier and was fully supportive of our move to Safe Food Pro. Safe Food Pro allows for the collation of all the pre-audit material required by the auditor at the click of one button.
Like the implementation of any new system in your business, it does require dedicating some time to understanding the product and how best to adapt it to the needs of your business, but we wouldn’t hesitate in recommending it to other food manufacturers and are more happy for anyone to contact us about it. It’s a great product, with great support and provides very good value for money.
Well done team Safe Food Pro!
Jo Williamson
Managing Director
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