I'm Chef Amber. I've been with the company for four and a half years and I'm a field trainer here at DIG. Our mission is just to modernize cooking, cook everything from scratch, and just being able to provide healthy veg-forward meals, fast and on-the-go.

Before we had Smart Sense, everything was done on paper. We were getting temperatures of our fridges. Everything was handwritten on this laminated sheet of paper. We would upload it on a document online. Someone would validate it.

Now that we have Smart Sense, we get to temp our food. We have the probe that allows us to hold all of our restaurants accountable. We also get active readings on all of our refrigerators, and that allows us to just make sure that we are always compliant with the health department. Now that we have a probe and something that tells you visually and it registers into a system, you can't really hide or run away from the truth.

When we first open up the restaurant at 11 o'clock, that's when we start taking temperatures of the food. Every restaurant does a great job first thing in the morning because the food is always hot without a doubt. But throughout the day you will start to see some kind of like dwindling down where the food is like warm, it's not hot like it should be. SmartSense really does a great job of when we take that temperature at 1:30pm or 3:30pm, which is a really pivotal period in the restaurants where everything kind of gets forgotten because everyone's prepping or everyone's on break. In that time frame when we have to use SmartSense, it does a really great job for us to say, “Okay well our broccoli is cold. We either make new broccoli or we re-fire our broccoli.” And we don't want to get caught in a position where our food isn't hitting temperature.

There's a report that gets sent out weekly. It's all of our restaurants in one document and three color tiers, so you have green, yellow, red. Green is stating that you're very spot on, you are actively doing your SmartSense within the five time frames that are happening throughout the day. Yellow is, like, you're doing an okay job, can do better and be more active. And managers can start really holding their hourly employees more accountable with doing their SmartSense more frequently. Red, obviously you have not been doing your SmartSense throughout the day, so there are a lot of targets that you were missing.

When you think of DIG and the atmosphere that we have behind the glass, which is in the kitchen, not a lot of people get to see that. For me personally, being a trainer here, I think culture in a restaurant is really really important. SmartSense really honed in the sense of ownership for a lot of people, not only for the manager of that restaurant, but also a sense of ownership for the hourly employees that live in that restaurant. It really minimizes, and this is just from experience, the amount of paperwork you have to do. If I were to do this in one day, that's a solid two hours that I could be spending on training something, or I can be spending it with the guests in the restaurant. Two hours of your day back in your pocket. SmartSense has really made our lives a lot easier, and has taken a weight off of our shoulders.