Table-Top Tablets- A Boon for Restaurants, and Diners with Food Allergies

by: Dilip Chopra

Like it or not, Table-top tablets are coming to a restaurant near you! When technologies this compelling are introduced, it is only a matter of time when they rapidly change existing landscapes.

Besides providing cost-savings and adding inefficiencies to a restaurant’s business model, these devices offer great advantages in terms of providing information to an increasing and, ever more-demanding base of diners who want to know what they are eating, and, the quality of the foods that they are consuming. According to the National Restaurant Association’s 2014 Trends Report, ‘locally-sourced’ and ‘Gluten-free’ foods are among the ‘top trends’ of the future. In short, all signs point to the fact that diners, besides wanting good tasting food, also have cravings for more information about their food. After all, we live in an age of information, interactivity and mobility!

Table-top ordering systems fill a gaping hole in the area of providing information, especially for diners whose entire dining experience (good or bad) depends on the avoidance of certain food ingredients.

Currently, diners with food allergies or gluten restrictions have to engage in a game of what may be described as the “allergy-pong”. Basically, this entails a ‘back and forth’ routine between diners, and restaurant-staff, around trying to find out which meals do not contain the ingredients that they are trying to avoid. Oftentimes, this game involves the engagement of the kitchen-staff including the chef. In most cases, even after playing this game, information obtained about food-content is not reliable or accurate. Given the hundreds of ingredients that go into the making of most restaurant menus, no one can be expected to remember all the ingredients, their many aliases or, their derivative sources.  No, not even the chef who prepares the food!

No wonder, restaurants mostly are uneasy about confidently serving customers with food allergies.  

Enter table-top tablets.

For diners with food allergies, these devices:  

  

1.      Can be a source of accurate menu information:  They can ease the burden of providing accurate information at the “point of order” for restaurants. For restaurants that choose to provide ingredient details of their menu items, these tablets provide an excellent venue. No more need for playing the game of “allergy-pong”. Ingredient information so crucial for diners with food allergies can be accessed right at the table. Ingredient-changes can be updated instantly assuring up to minute accuracy. The paper menus of today cannot match this capability of real-time updates.

2.      Provide a media for ‘relevant information’ dissemination: For those restaurants that want to improve the dining experience of their customers with food allergies, these devices provide an excellent venue for programs such as ‘Interactive Allergen Menus’ (www.gipsee.com) which instantly provide diners with menu options that fit their individual customized needs. Diners with food allergies simply select ingredients they wish to avoid and instantly view their meal options right at the table!

3.      Improve the dining experience with more available options: Gipsee’sInteractive Allergen Menus, as an example, contain features such as “Alternate Suggestive” logic that suggest ‘substitutable’ options to diners. Example, if the ingredients of a particular sauce interfere with a diner’s selections, the system interactively, recommends another sauce that may be available and, safe to consume given their specific set of restrictions.     

4.      Are more than just meal-ordering machines: They can be efficient communication tools. Example, diners with food restrictions can send special comments/instructions to the kitchen staff regarding their food allergies sparing them the agony of having to enunciate their restrictions to the waiter/waitress. Why not ‘e-message’ the kitchen directly instead of risking communicating with the wait-staff? As diners with food allergies realize all too well, most wait-staff in restaurants do not completely understand the difference between allergies and preferences in the first place!

5.      Are excellent means of gathering diner-reviews: Customers with food allergies now have a powerful tool at the table for providing reviews on their dining experience as well as the ability to share their experience with others via social media or, restaurant review sites like Yelp, Opentable, Urbanspoon. 

6.      Reduce risks: By providing accurate information these devices can reduce risk-factors (for both the restaurant and the diner) that exist today from miscommunications or misunderstandings about meal ingredients.

Of course, restaurants still need to pay special attention to issues such as cross-contamination in the kitchens. The process of ingredient-identification, however, will get a lot easier and streamlined with the implementation of these table-top devices.

Food Allergies: Food Allergies -What's a QR code got to do with it...

Food Allergies: Food Allergies -What's a QR code got to do with it...: Food Allergies -What's a QR code got to do with it? The strange looking squares that have recently been appearing everywhere fro...

Allergen Tables – an Outdated & Expensive Way of Presenting Important Info

Allergen Tables – an Outdated & Expensive Way of Presenting Important Info

PROPOSITION 37: THE RIGHT TO KNOW

By Anchal Ahuja

Growing up, most kids rely on their parents to provide them with nutritious and balanced meals. This was certainly the case for me- I never had to think twice about what I was eating, because I was assured that my parents would only bring safe, healthy food into our home. The thought never crossed my mind that I could be eating something potentially dangerous, or maybe have ingredients I wouldn’t expect. However, I am now well into my first semester of college at the University of Colorado at Boulder, which has brought numerous changes for me, including my eating habits. I have been handed over the responsibility to make my own healthy eating choices, which can be quite a struggle for college students like me with limited options.

Fortunately, my school offers a large variety of cuisines to choose from every day, and I have grown accustomed to the plethora of food I can select from for every meal. I began to wonder how so much food could be provided to our large student body consisting of over 30,000 students every single day, let alone the entire country. Mass produced food is unavoidable in today’s world, but has never seemed to be a real threat to our communities. The question is, is that because mass produced food really is safe, or because we don’t know enough about the food we consume on a daily basis?

This is a much more pressing question for residents of California, who have been given the opportunity to potentially change the direction of America’s food industry for good. Proposition 37 is an initiative on the California 2012 election ballot that would require all genetically modified  food that is produced to be labeled, and would also ban labeling processed food as ‘natural’. This proposal may just be another “food movement” attempt to those in the state, but if the law passes, the results could be extremely beneficial and quickly spread through the entire country, permanently changing the food industry we know today. California is roughly 12% of our nation’s population, and its dominating influence over America’s agriculture business can easily challenge the current system.

Most mass produced food is genetically modified- it wouldn’t be available in abundance if it wasn’t. Almost everything we consume on a daily basis has been altered in some way, and cannot be called completely natural. Soy, sugar, and corn itself are present in most foods, and 88% or higher of each of those items available in our country are genetically modified.  Advancements in technology and science from the early 1900’s have enabled our agricultural industry to flourish, by injecting different types of hormones into our crops to help them grow triple in size, and resist pests and drought. Even more recently, scientists found a way to inject organism DNA into certain crops in order to give the fruit or vegetable the gene of survival in harsh weather conditions. The most famous example remains the fish and strawberry story, where scientists would inject the DNA of a fish who was well adjusted to cold-climate waters into a strawberry plant, thus making the strawberries resistant to harsh frost in the wintertime. This raises several questions regarding unexplained food allergies, health risks, and the untold side of the food industry. What are we really eating, and how come our society is still kept in the dark about what is in our food?

Though mass production and GMO’s have made food production cheaper, faster, and more efficient, it poses a problem for many college students just like me who seek healthier food options. CU Boulder freshman Seerie Clark also finds that her personal dietary needs are not being met through the large scale food industry. “Health value is much more important to me than taste value, so I always look for foods with a lot of nutrient variety. Unfortunately, my options are limited,” she says. Clark claims that if almost everything she is consuming has been genetically modified, it is impossible to differentiate the healthy choices from the not so healthy choices.

Proposition 37 would eliminate the time we students spend trying to figure out what to eat every day. With so many choices offered, but none of them guaranteed to be GMO free, we are forced to take risks every time we sit down for a meal. The food we eat may of course have nutritional value, but could be injected with various hormones and DNA we are not aware of, which raises the concerns of food allergies, as well. Say a person who is severely allergic to fish sits down with a bowl of fresh strawberries, and is suddenly struck with a terrible allergic reaction that could potentially be fatal. Their doctor would claim that they have developed an allergy to strawberries, when in reality, it is the lack of awareness that had almost cost them their life.

The CU Boulder Coordinator for Sustainable Dining, Lauren Heising, conducted a survey of 80 random students on campus, and found out that 57 of those people deemed freshness and nutritional value to be the most important factor when choosing what to eat at the dining halls, proving that a large majority of the student body, and possibly students and families all across the nation, truly do care about the health value of their food. “We are trying to increase our local, organic, and sustainable food products here at CU, such as potatoes, apples, pears, and cabbage,” Heising says, “but you can’t make a loaf of bread with one hundred percent Colorado wheat.” She pointed out that there is no concrete definition of ‘local’ in the food industry, and that there are unclear boundaries when it comes to the agriculture business in different states. For example, if chickens are born and bred in a local Colorado farm, but they are sent to a farm in California to be processed and distributed, does that still make the chicken a local product? Although these blurry lines aren’t clear, the answer to get them is, and Mrs. Heising certainly agrees. “I hope that Proposition 37 gets approved. It would be great to have [GMO’S] labeled for the benefit of our society.”

There is a lot of support for this proposition to pass, but there is always someone who opposes, too. Large food distributing businesses are contributing a lot of money to rally up more voters to say ‘no’ to this initiative, while local and organic farming communities in California continue to back the proposition with support from organic based companies and California health groups. The supporters’ slogan, “The Right To Know”, explains it all; Americans have the right to know what they are consuming on a daily basis, and requiring labeling of genetically modified food will only help our society start the food movement towards healthier lifestyles.

I would like to thank Lauren Heising and Seerie Clark for letting me interview them and credit them in this article. All the information I have stated comes from the websites I have linked in the article. Thank you to Gipsee.com for letting me publish my opinions.

Food Allergies -What's a QR code got to do with it?

The strange looking squares that have recently been appearing everywhere from ketchup bottles to presidential campaign buses now have a new role in the field of food allergies. Aurora, Colorado based Gipsee, Inc., in cooperation with the Denver-based restaurant chain, MADgreens, have introduced an innovative way of utilizing QR code technology to make it easier for people with food allergies and dietary restrictions to eat at all Colorado MADgreens locations.

Here is how it works: Customers with food allergies and/or dietary preferences (such as vegans and vegetarians), simply scan strategically placed QR codes at MADgreens locations using their smart-phones. The scan takes the customer directly to a menu screen asking the customer to select foods or ingredients they wish to avoid in their meals. Given the customer's unique combinations of food restrictions, the smart-phone instantly displays menu items from the MADgreens menu that are safe for consumption. The list of undesired ingredients is not limited to the commonly designated eight or nine major allergy groupings; rather, there are hundreds of ingredient choices allowing for any user to select ingredient combinations that are as unique as they are.

"The practical part of utilizing QR codes in this mode is that customers have access to relevant information in the palm of their hands, at the time of ordering," says Atul Ahuja, one of the co-founders of Gipsee. "Most restaurants that present food allergy or ingredient information, do so on their websites, which are inaccessible to a customer when he/she is in the restaurant, is hungry and, in the case of QSR establishments, is typically short on time", adds Ahuja. "With the QR codes, there is no need to download any apps, and any customer with any smart-phone can instantly view safe menu choices, order agreeable meals and get going with their busy schedules."

MADgreens has the QR code display labels placed at the entrance of each location as well as inside the restaurant for reliable visibility and accessibility.

"Gipsee is merely leveraging its already developed food allergy analysis technology to allow customers with food allergies and dietary restrictions to eat more freely at restaurants," says Dilip Chopra, Gipsee's other co-founder, "there are about 25 million people in the US alone, including vegetarians, vegans, or those with food allergies, who have to be very particular about what they eat. Restaurants have a huge market that they can cater to, and the QR codes add a whole new dimension to providing relevant information where and when it is needed to help those who struggle with dining out, to make safe ordering decisions."

Gipsee is the industry leader in providing technologies that help restaurants, K-12 schools and the hospitality industries to generate interactive, customized menus. Gipsee technologies have won awards and national recognition including being selected as the finalist in the Food Safety category by the National Restaurant Association for the 2012 Operator Innovations Award for Gipsee's K-12 school Food Allergy Management system called AllerSchool. Recently, Gipsee was recognized in FastCasuals Magazine's

" 2012 Top 100 Movers and Shakers" for the Restaurant industry, and "100 Biggest Stories of 2011" in the Restaurant Industry by QSR magazine.

Improving the Food Allergy World...

Interesting write-up about the AllerSchool System for K12 school districts:

http://foodallergytherapist.com/improving-the-food-allergy-world-one-school-district-and-one-app-at-a-time/

School Menus they way they ought to be: http://gipsee.com/schools/d11/
Colorado Springs School District 11- Leading the way on serving kids with food allergies