Trust Bites

Jeremy Zenlea is back this week to talk about the role of technology in managing today’s complex global supply chain.

Consumer-facing technologies like restaurant ordering kiosks can give consumers choice and control and deliver up-to-date nutritional information.

Even more important is what technology can do behind the scenes: remote temperature monitoring and other automated systems that can be deployed to quietly keep consumers safe. AI chatbots food industry employees can use to report symptoms that provide real-time guidance to prevent the further spread of disease. These are but a few use cases for advanced technology in food safety, and things are only getting started.

The supply chain will only get more complicated in the future, but according to Zenlea, technology is here to help.
  • (00:18) - Introduction and Guest Background
  • (01:45) - Use of Technology in Food Safety and Customer Experience
  • (04:21) - Leveraging AI for Employee Health Monitoring
  • (07:19) - Conclusion and Invitation for Future Discussion

This podcast is presented by My Trusted Source.
Produced by Joe Diaco Podcasting Support. 

Creators & Guests

Host
Dr. Darin Detwiler
Dr. Darin Detwiler is a nationally recognized leader in food regulatory industry and academia, with over 25 years of consultation for industry, government, and NGOs.
Guest
Jeremy Zenlea
Director, Head of Health and Safety at EG America

What is Trust Bites?

Hosted by food safety industry leader and consumer advocate Dr. Darin Detwiler, "Trust Bites" examines the challenges of ensuring food safety in a complex global marketplace and maintaining brand reputation.

With the rise of global food trade, consumers, retailers, and producers alike are increasingly concerned about the safety and quality of the food they buy. Many existing validation systems are outdated, bureaucratic, and expensive, creating inefficiency and allowing vital information to slip through the cracks.

"Trust Bites" delves into the validation process, discussing the challenges and limitations of current systems and exploring fair and equitable solutions.

Darin Detwiler: Hello everyone. Welcome to this episode of Trust Bites, presented by My Trusted Source, your digital solution for a very complex global supply chain.

With me today is Jeremy Zenlea. He is one of the advisory board members for My Trusted Source.

Jeremy, welcome.

Jeremy Zenlea: Hey Darin, how are you?

Darin Detwiler: Great. Great. Thank you for joining us.

For our audience who might not know who you are, will you tell us a little bit about you?

Jeremy Zenlea: Sure. I am the director and head of health and safety for EG America. EG America is the parent company to a bunch of popular convenience stores located across the United States.

Darin Detwiler: About how many we're talking about?

Jeremy Zenlea: We have about 1,600 locations, and that includes things like franchises as well, like Burger Kings and all those. We actually also have our own QSR concepts, called Ria's, that's pretty interesting. So, we run the gamut.

Darin Detwiler: And you personally are in every location at all times, right?

Jeremy Zenlea: I'm in every location at all times right now, as we speak!

Darin Detwiler: Wow. That's very cool.

Jeremy Zenlea: It's incredible.

I don't know how much my wife would like, what, 1,600 of me around. I think one's probably enough if you ask her.

Hey, if we could do it, we would.

Darin Detwiler: Wasn't there a Michael Keaton movie, Multiplicity, where he kept doubling himself or, you know, duplicating himself so that he could... I think he had like half a dozen or so

Jeremy Zenlea: Yeah,

Darin Detwiler: It's kind of a thing.

Jeremy: That'd be a nightmare.

Darin Detwiler: Well, that's not a realistic use of technology!

But I would imagine that there are some realistic uses of technology in this space when we're looking at food safety, food safety culture, building trust, maintaining the trust and relationships.

I would imagine that there are some technologies and innovations that are being used.

Jeremy Zenlea: Yeah, absolutely. So, right now we have about two, I'd say maybe larger categories of technology that's being used. We have the operationally-focused technology. And then we have the consumer-driven technology,

Both categories incorporate safety, of course, because they have to do that when we're talking about consumer driven technology. You're looking at more of the use of concepts like AI to drive what the consumer wants and how to tell them what they want before they even know that they want it.

So, for example. If you are someone, if you, I don't know if you've ever called like Verizon or something, you get on and you're talking with someone that's not, sometimes it's not a real person. It's a chat bot that's just giving you different solutions. Well, we're kind of doing the same thing where you would have a, maybe a kiosk selling, you'd go on and you'd say, okay, "What, what interests you? I prefer healthy food." Okay, well, now we're going to move you to this category.

"And I prefer, I don't know, pumpernickel over rye." Okay, well, now we're going to move you to this category.

And in the end, it gets you to build the sandwich that you want, right?

That's the customer experience side. Okay, where we come in from safety is we do things like make sure the nutritionals are up to date. So if the consumer, if they say, "I want healthy options," we actually are going through and helping identify which ones are healthy as opposed to which ones aren't healthy. Which sometimes, especially with, like, kids products or kids-focused food products, is actually pretty difficult.

And so we do that on the safety side. We're looking more at things that are remote monitoring because we are decentralized. We have stores all over the place.

Like you said, unfortunately, as much as I love to be every single location at every single minute, every single day, that is just not possible. So, we have technologies that we've leveraged, like things that we're trying out as such, like remote temperature monitoring, being able to remotely monitor temperatures of things that are critical, like critical equipment, our coolers, for example, our sandwich cases, whatever else we have. We even have ways to remotely monitor friolators to make sure they're frying at certain temperatures, that's even things that you can do.

So, we look at leveraging those technologies. Some other technology that we've looked at in the past is driving a certain type of behavior for our employee. One thing that is actually not an easy concept in the retail food world is the idea of the reportable illnesses through the FDA.

And basically, for those That may not be aware what those are, is there are certain types of illnesses, symptoms, so on and so forth, that if the state or wherever you are is under the FDA model food code, you actually have to exclude that person, restrict them, and if they have certain things, you have to actually partner with the health department or the local health department, state health or whatever have you is in that location, to understand next steps and hopefully mitigate the issue.

Well, that is a tall order because, as I'm sure you can imagine, a lot of the symptoms that they talk about could be indicative of other things, right?

Vomiting. We have people that come in and they vomit because they are hungover or pregnant, or whatever reason. It doesn't necessarily mean that they have E. coli poisoning or they have salmonella or anything like that. It just means that there's other factors.

Well, the issue we came in is how do you decide between one symptom versus the other? To add another level of complexity on that, HR and obviously, because of private health information, we are not allowed to ask someone, are you pregnant? We're not allowed to ask someone really in-depth, personal questions. We just don't do that anyways, because that's not fair to them. And we don't want to make them feel uncomfortable.

So, what we did is we actually leveraged AI. And we created a chat bot- driven health system called Health Check, where all employees, if they have a symptom, they go on to Health Check. We designed this in partnership with a team of medical professionals, as well as a representative from health departments.

And it basically, it takes them through. Okay, I have, I have a headache. Okay. Well, the chat bot will take you through it, right? The chat bot's pretty cool. It's like a little Band Aid guy. Health Check Band Aid. And that's technology that we were able to leverage to solve this problem, which was really hurting us, in terms of having the wrong people out, some people not out, having people excluded that shouldn't be excluded. It actually is a fairly messy thing. There, there were illnesses, but again, we leverage technology to get around it.

Darin Detwiler: Well, Jeremy, that's a very good point. I wasn't really thinking about it in terms of employee health, but between rodent activity monitoring and temperatures and the ways we talked about before, like the idea of validations, traceability, transparency all the validation efforts. There's a lot of ways in which new technologies and innovations are being used in the retail space, especially when you're talking about the number of franchises like this. I'm hoping that you'll come back and we'll talk again about technology, but perhaps look at the other side of the story, looking at weaknesses, threats, and obstacles in terms of technology. Thank you very much for watching this episode of Trust Bites, presented by My Trusted Source.

I'm Dr. Darren Detweiler. Have a great day.