Streamlining Food Safety & Compliance.

Creating a HACCP compliant digital tool

Project Overview

Most retirement and assisted living homes, as well as hospitals, rely on paper to ensure they are HACCP compliant. They generate reports to monitor fridge temperatures, food temperature sensors, and to create food safety reports. This not only produces a significant amount of paper waste, but also uses a chunk of their budget just for paper. Our goal was to create an all-in-one tool that helped them keep track of all this information digitally, reducing their paper waste and letting them use their budget towards something more valuable.

Goal

When I was first approached for this project, the stakeholder did not have a clear vision in mind but had two main goals for this feature:

Reduce paper waste, thereby reducing their paper costs
Create an easy-to-use tool for the kitchen staff and registered dieticians to keep track of all things HACCP-related

Process

Research

I began the research process with a round of user interviews. I spoke to MealSuite employees who have worked in the food safety industry, as well as customer support agents who work closely with clients. These interviews helped me understand the clients' needs and the strict HACCP regulations.

Due to COVID-19 restrictions and time constraints, interviewing and observing actual users was not possible.

Scope & Features

The research provided me and the stakeholders with a better understanding of HACCP and the client's needs. We began to scope out the different functionalities and tools for this feature and its integration into MealSuite's systems: Touch and Touch Admin.

Wireframes

Despite the challenges of competitive analysis, I had sufficient information from the user interviews to start ideating and creating different layouts and ways to organize the information. Because HACCP compliance is very important, I wanted to ensure that the information architecture would provide the necessary information.

Design

After going through two iterations of the wireframes and gathering feedback from stakeholders and MealSuite employees, I started creating the designs.

Throughout the design process, I performed user testing on MealSuite employees. After each round of testing, iterations were made until a suitable design that met their needs was created.

Developers were involved early on in the process and were aware of any functionality and scope changes, ensuring project feasibility.

Conclusion

At the beginning of this project, we only had our goals and no clear vision for the feature or its functionalities. However, after extensive research, user testing, and interviews, we developed HACCP HQ. This new feature, integrated into both Touch and Touch Admin, assists kitchen staff and registered dieticians in managing HACCP checklists, reports, and temperature logs for food and non-food items. It also provides alerts for missed reports and temperature logs.

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