When Terry the cook from Fawlty Towers said “what the eye don’t see the chef gets away with”, he was oblivious to the enormous business risks posed by food contamination.
For any catering establishment other than Basil’s, regulating and monitoring fridge and freezer temperatures should be taken very seriously indeed.
Enter CCP, as in ‘critical control points’, which has launched an online monitoring system for the food industry. Subscribers are alerted via their phones about temperature variances – in time to avoid a mass outbreak of giardia.
CCP’s IP was devised by Anthony Rowley, a former Telstra internet heavy hitter and was first tested on export tuna.
Rowley says a fridge might record three degrees at closing time and three degrees in the morning. “But if the fridge goes off overnight they will never know and it is in breach of safety rules.”
Food safety is one aspect and efficiency is another: Rowley says cafes average three to four fridges, with cooling accounting for 15% of global electricity usage.
In effect CCP is another player in the internet of things (IoT) sphere: the interconnectivity of devices with equipment for monitoring and business optimisation purposes.
CCP can also improve business efficiency and predict the failure of key equipment.
In the case of Meals on Wheels, this meant avoiding the breakdown of a compressor and several dozen queasy senior citizens.
Last month CCP cracked it lucky in Las Vegas by winning a monitoring deal with the Stratosphere Casino, home of the Top of the World restaurant.
This establishment won the 2016 Best of Las Vegas Gold Award for fine dining – and one doesn’t get such a gong for serving dodgy prawns.
In all there are 2400 restaurants and one million potential monitoring points in the buffet-loving town, which has led CCP to create a permanent sales presence there.
In its biggest deal to date CCP snared a $US180, 000 ($240,000) deal with a US food consulting firm. CCP chalked up a mere $70,000 of revenue in the March quarter. Cash outflows were $500,000 and cash on hand stood at $1.07m, with expected current-quarter burn of $620,000.
Sensing its financials were getting tight, CCP this month raised $518,000 in an institutional placement and is tapping a further $850,000 in a rights offer at 1.7c apiece.
CCP doesn’t charge an upfront fee, but levies clients $15 per per month per monitoring point, over a two-year contract.
On our back of the serviette sums, CCP needs about 20,000 monitoring points to break even it currently has only 800. But as CCP did not start selling in earnest until January, the new customer run rate should improve dramatically.
