Almost every food service business is still in the mode of “trying to keep the doors open.” It is a virtually universal stance, but is it enough to survive this crisis? And what happens when the next crisis appears?
New trends since COVID-19 are signaling that keeping the status quo of reactive policies alone — such as “just keeping the doors open” — is not enough moving forward. In fact, I believe that this pandemic has accelerated the need for proactive policies and modernization of quality initiatives to a place that the industry previously expected to happen five to ten years from now.
I like the way Brain Chesky, Chief Executive at Airbnb, recently spoke about the urgency around the need for customer service-heavy industries to adapt quickly and more proactively: “I did not know that I would make 10 years’ worth of decisions in 10 weeks.”
Below are four reasons why you need to modernize faster in our new normal, including tips about where to start:
1. You need dynamic, real-time insights, not static, point-in-time snapshots.
Both FSMA and the New Era of Smarter Food Safety state that you need to produce information to the FDA within 24 hours of when it was requested. That alone is incredibly difficult to do, if not impossible, with manual processes such as spreadsheets and email chains.