Voted Best Senior’s Residences in Calgary this last year, Silvera for Seniors is a nonprofit housing organization offering exceptional care to its communities since 1962.

A key pillar to their success has been their outstanding dining program, focused on fresh ingredients, variety and optimal nutrition – backed by integrated foodservice technology to help them deliver quality and consistency across their 10+ supportive living locations.

Recently, we sat down with Silvera’s own Krista Gerelus, Technical Advisor of Dining and spearhead of the foodservice program’s menus, processes and procedures. With a spectrum of responsibilities, Krista uses technologies like Wireless Temperature Sensors to save time, mitigate risk and lead her team to success.

Watch the video and read on as she shares her experience automating her temperature tracking (and why you should consider going digital, too!).

Manual temperature tracking = risk for costly consequences

With digital temperature sensors in two of her sites currently, Krista says that she’s “very excited to get (them) into all of our communities as soon as possible.” Because, she knows firsthand how costly an outage can be:

“We’ve had two examples of this happening over the last three months where the fridges went down overnight... And when the morning shift came in... they realized that they needed to empty the fridge and move into emergency procedures to feed the residents.”

Krista added that the cost of spoiled food can be significant in more ways than one, stating that “the last (malfunction) specifically... we lost about $1,600 worth of food that we needed to throw in the garbage... And then, the process of reordering and getting more food in the door and re-prepping all of that food can come with a cost as well.”

Wireless Temperature Sensors “take the human error out of the equation”

“It definitely helps to have the temperature sensors because then we take the human error out of the equation, and we know if the fridges and freezers are functioning the way that they're supposed to be functioning,” Krista explained.

Peace of mind with text message alerts

“If the fridges go down, and the temperatures go up, we get alerted.”

Integrated digital sensors from MealSuite alert Krista immediately via text if her temperatures go out of range. She goes on to explain that “our maintenance person, our dining manager, supervisor or myself – we'll all get alerts to our cell phones to say that this fridge isn't functioning properly.” This allows the team to instantly “send somebody over to check it and fix it before we lose food.”

Automation takes pressure off a busy team

Why does Krista recommend wireless sensors to other communities? “It takes the pressure off a team who’s already doing several checklists... we no longer need to go around and fill up those checklists three times a day because we know what our temperatures are,” she explained.

Wireless Temperature Senors are integrated with MealSuite’s all-encompassing HACCP software that includes digital checklists and resident-centered production tools. That means all your safety procedures and logs in a single digital space – no more cumbersome paper!

If Krista’s story resonates with you, and you’re ready take your temperature tracking digital, click here to request a quote for MealSuite Wireless Temperature Sensors.