The Taste of Confidence: Security Solutions for the Food and Beverage Industry

Whether you run a big restaurant chain or manage a small grab-and-go market, you want to provide your customers with a friendly, hospitable experience. But while your guests are relaxing and enjoying themselves, you know that there’s a lot going on behind the scenes to create that welcoming environment.

From protecting temperature-sensitive inventory to managing employee access to monitoring occupancy and wait times, food and beverage business owners have a lot on their plate. Alarm.com for Business has a unified commercial security platform that makes your life a little easier.

Protecting Valuable Inventory

Keeping hot, cold, or frozen inventory on hand is essential for any food and business operation, but it’s also a big liability. According to FeedingAmerica.org, U.S. restaurants generate an estimated 22 to 33 billion pounds of food waste each year, and all it takes is a faulty condenser or a freezer door left open for thousands of dollars of precious merchandise to be ruined. Local health regulations may require you to manually record temperatures, but user error or a dishonest employee might make this old-school system less than reliable.

Alarm.com’s Smarter Business Temperature Monitoring solution can keep you confident that hot and cold stock are the right temperature 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Keep track of multiple temperature zones in real time using the Alarm.com app or web dashboard from anywhere. Set alerts for when temperatures are outside of your chosen range so you can take action immediately when something goes wrong.

Any food and beverage business can be one broken freezer away from a costly disaster. Rest assured with Alarm.com’s Smarter Business Temperature Monitoring* knowing that your hot foods are hot, your cold foods are cold, and that you won’t be mopping ice cream off the freezer floor when you get to work in the morning.

Manage Employee Access

You can’t be everywhere at once. Unless your food and beverage business consists of a single vending machine, you’re going to have to manage employees and trust that they’ll keep your operation running smoothly. Employees opening late and closing early is, on average, the most costly event facing food and beverage businesses, costing over $500 per incident each year. With an Alarm.com business access control system, you’ll be able to monitor who’s coming and going from your business, and when—letting you troubleshoot with your teams so you can help everyone tighten their timing, while ensuring the coverage you need.

Our unified commercial security platform lets you quickly onboard new hires or remove access for former employees from the app in a matter of minutes. For multiple hires, easily bulk-manage employee access to save time and improve the onboarding process. Make hiring short-term staff less of a headache by setting up temporary access for seasonal workers that automatically expires.

Not only can you control who has access without having to contact your security dealer or get keys copied, you can keep an eye on employees’ arrivals and departures. Late openings and early closings cost your business money and hurt your reputation with customers. With Alarm.com for Business, you can get alerts if an employee is opening late or closing early and take immediate action and stay in control of your business.

Keep Tabs on Occupancy and Wait Times

Whether you serve breakfast burritos or cocktails, every food and beverage business experiences the “dinner rush.” So it’s no surprise that roughly three-quarters of food and beverage businesses report that tracking occupancy levels is a “very” valuable capability, according to Parks Associates 2020 data. If you’re prepared and properly staffed, you can make more money in these few hours than in the rest of the day combined. But if you’re unprepared, you could end up with unacceptable wait times, overcrowded locations that violate occupancy rules, and frustrated customers who might not give you a second chance.

Ensuring that you’re properly staffed during the busiest hours, and not over-staffed during the off-peak hours, is critical to running a successful food and beverage business. You need eyes in the back of your head to be sure everything is running smoothly during this crucial money-making period, but that’s tricky, especially if you have multiple locations to look after.

With video surveillance and Business Activity Analytics from Alarm.com for Business, you can keep tabs on occupancy numbers, set capacity alerts, and track average wait times. With this extra set of eyes, you’ll ensure you’re always properly staffed and that your operation is running at peak efficiency.

An All-In-One Solution

Owning or managing a food and beverage business is more than a full-time job. To stay on top of all the moving pieces, you need a security system that’s tailored to your specific needs. Having the various parts of your restaurant security system siloed with different companies means you’re miss out on the synergy and operational insights that come with a unified restaurant security solution.

Combining video surveillance, access control, intrusion detection, and temperature monitoring with Alarm.com for Business makes for a security system that’s more than the sum of its parts. Keep track of it all on a single, intuitive interface with the Enterprise Dashboard—and do it remotely from anywhere, anytime with the easy-to-use app.

_{*Alarm.com's Smarter Business Temperature Monitoring comes included with our commercial security system.}