ITWatchDogs Offers Environmental Products
to the Food Industry

Privacy and Security Policy

ITWatchDogs, a manufacturer of environmental monitoring products for nearly a decade, does more than just watch over data centers and server rooms - it watches over kitchens in restaurants as well.

"ITWatchDogs' environmental monitoring devices help protect perishable inventory and maintain food quality and safety by alerting restaurant personnel of power failures or when coolers' and freezers' temperatures start dropping due to a mechanical problem or the door being open for too long" Mo Sheikh, marketing programs manager at ITWatchDogs, told TMCnet in a recent interview.

"We hear all the time how our monitors alerted restaurant owners when the cooler door was left open after food deliveries or when power was lost over a holiday," he added.

ITWatchDogs' mission statement is to help IT and facility administrators protect critical infrastructure and prevent system downtime, hardware damage and data loss, and this mission extends to restaurant owners as well. The environmental monitoring company produces high-quality, reliable environmental monitors that can be useful for the safety and protection of perishable goods.

While ITWatchDogs' environmental monitors are typically used in data center and server room applications, they have found a home in the food business as well.

"With the low-cost, ease of use and high feature set, our devices have attracted many end users from various climate and power monitoring applications, including restaurants, pharmaceutical companies, cold storages, climate controlled warehouses and more," Sheikh said.

In the restaurant market, in the event that a refrigerator or freezer warms up or cools down when no one is around, the monitors will send alerts to the managers to ensure that the food remains safe. Without ITWatchDogs' Web-based environmental monitoring, you would never notice if the food became unsafe, according to Sheikh.

ITWatchDogs produces a variety of environmental monitoring products, but the MiniGoose II is the go-to product for this application.

The MiniGoose II, which provides Web-based remote surveillance, logging and graphing of temperature and connected sensors, supports 16 additional sensors. Managers can use this product to view and log temperature and other connected sensors over the intranet or the Web, and no software is required.

If temperature or other forms of measurements stray from their usual levels, the environmental monitoring product starts sending alarm notices through email and text messages to managers.  

"With something that requires such a low investment, restaurant owners are never left in the dark as to what happened over the weekend or during a holiday," Sheikh said.

"It's important to understand that the deterioration of temperature-sensitive or time-temperature-sensitive foods starts immediately after the food product has been processed and will then largely depend on how well the cold chain can be maintained," he added. "ITWatchDogs' monitors display graphs and keeps data logs of all sensor measurements, providing a straightforward summary of the time/temperature exposure history of foods and beverages."

Because it is so important to deliver the highest quality and safest food, hundreds of restaurants, school cafeterias and refrigeration applications around the world have turned to ITWatchDogs' products.

The environmental monitoring company boasts McDonald's as one of its customers.

"With our environmental monitors, restaurant owners are able to prevent unhealthy bacteria from growing on food and harming their customers," Sheikh said. "As a result food waste is reduced and consumers have greater confidence about food quality."