Joses’s Bar & Grill is a very popular restaurant with locations in Windsor and Leamington Ontario, Canada. Upon recent renovations of the Windsor facility, Ernie Nesbitt decided to implement cutting edge technology solutions to provide real-time monitoring of his food refrigeration equipment including walk-in coolers, freezers and stand-alone refrigerators that are utilized for storing fresh and frozen foods.
The intent of this investment was to implement technology that could provide early warning notification of his refrigeration and freezers to prevent any possibilities of food not being stored at the proper safe temperatures. Although this is not mandated by Health Canada, Mr. Nesbitt wanted to ensure quality control issues met the highest possible standards as part of his commitment to top-of-class food services.
When it came to implementing a solution, Mr. Nesbitt had an idea of what functionality that he wanted. This wish list included an easy-to use temperature-monitoring system that could provide a visible display of the temperatures of all of his refrigerators and freezers, including historical information so that he could review the performance of his equipment. It also had to provide alert notification (but email alerts and SMS text message alerts) to alert key staff in the event that a cooling system was exceeding pre-set warning limits.
Enviromon.net (a leading world-wide supplier of Environmental monitoring equipment) was chosen to provide a solution that would meet Mr. Nesbitt’s expectations. As part of the solution, Enviromon provided Securityhawk base units and expansion chassis coupled with water-resistant temperature sensors. These sensors were mounted inside of the actual coolers/freezers and connected using standard CAT5 Ethernet cable to the base units, which were connected to the internal network. The solution also included Enviromon’s Cloud-hawk web-based application. The Cloud-hawk application which can be accessed from outside of the customer’s internal network and can also be accessed from any device with a web browser (including iPhone’s, iPads, tablet devices and traditional computers).
The base units that connect to the sensors (and also to the internal network), transmit the collected data to a Cloud-hosted Server (located on amazon.com EC2 infrastructure) where the information can be accessed through the web-based application (Cloud-hawk.com). The customer has a secure login that allows him to access his sensor data and also access the historical reporting of each individual sensor. This application also provides both email and SMS text notification alerts to users and even has built-in notification logic in the event that the base unit (located within the Restaurant) stops responding. This same system can also provide sensor data access to the separate system that is being implemented at Jose’s other Restaurant location, though one single console.