Lobster Place Partner Profile
Industry: Retail
Challenge: Lobster Place needed a way to actively monitor environmental temperature conditions in a variety of retail storage units to ensure food safety and quality.
ABOUT
Lobster Place is a family-owned wholesale and retail seafood business founded in 1974. Today, the wholesale business serves over 800 accounts in the food and beverage hospitality industry. Its retail storefront offers a wide selection of raw seafood and beverages, a restaurant and raw oyster bar in downtown Manhattan to more than 14,000 weekly visitors.
SOLUTION
Lobster Place installed the Cooltrax Fresh InStore system in a plug-and-play fashion to continuously monitor various temperature-controlled food and beverage storage points through a central web portal. The storage points include walk-in freezer units, customer reach-in-display units, under-the-counter fridges, wine coolers, and even a specialty case.
RESULTS
- Automated food safety compliance
- Optimized efficiency of HVAC system
- Food safety assurance
- Proactive response to prevent food loss
- Data-driven insights
- Detailed audit trail for compliance
“Cooltrax Fresh InStore provides us with real-time alerts and detailed logs of temperature range data. This information is vitally important, especially during the summer months, for us to respond immediately to any refrigeration issues and ensure the food we serve to our customers is safe. The solution also provides an audit trail that we can use to show compliance with government entities.”
FINDING A PROVEN AND RELIABLE SOLUTION TOGETHER
Lobster Place has a wholesale business that serves customers in the restaurant and hospitality industries from a 30,000-square-foot facility in the Bronx. About six years ago, the retail side of the business renovated its Chelsea Market storefront in downtown Manhattan. Project engineers undersized the HVAC system, which resulted in managers and team members checking thermometers regularly.
Based on a referral from the wholesale business, Lobster Place installed Cooltrax sensors in HVAC ducts at the storefront. Data insights identied problem areas to update the volume of the HVAC system, and the sensors placed in storage units immediately alert managers and employees at the counters via a shared email address if any temperatures fall out of range.
In addition, the company uses the technology to monitor ambient temperatures at its Chelsea Market restaurant to alert if conditions get too warm or cool for customers. Lobster Place likes to keep its doors open when the weather is nice.
IMMEDIATE RESULTS LEADING TO BETTER OUTCOMES
By using the Cooltrax Fresh InStore system, the owners and manager of Lobster Place were able to automate their food safety compliance, remove manual processes and have peace of mind knowing that any exceptions are immediately detected and acted upon to ensure food safety and prevent loss. Reports can be run for any date range on temperatures for any storage unit. If there was a spike, the record shows what was done to resolve the problem and provides an audit trail for federal and state agencies.
