Squizify founder and CEO Daniel McDouall talks about the importance of food safety compliance
Now more than ever, food safety is taking centre stage in the quick service restaurant (QSR) industry as customers become increasingly hygiene-conscious. With all the uncertainty brought about by COVID-19, QSRs need to pay extra attention to their business’ safety requirements in order to ensure compliance, improve profitability, and ensure customer satisfaction.
This is where companies like Squizify can help. With its robust digital food safety system, QSRs can have real-time food safety visibility and control.
Squizify’s founder and CEO Daniel McDouall worked in the hospitality industry for over 15 years as a multi-site franchisee, and has seen first-hand the problems that QSR brands face on a day-to-day basis. “Food safety is such an important part of any QSR business and if you don't get it right, it can be devastating for brands and livelihoods alike,” he shares.
Out of his own frustration, McDouall and his team built a digital food safety system system that's now being used by thousands of restaurants across four different countries.
Find out more about Squizify in this exclusive interview with McDouall:
Tell us about Squizify and the role it plays in the QSR industry.
Squizify is an operational excellence platform specialising in digital food safety compliance. We work with QSRs to improve the visibility across the entire network from the safety perspectives, giving them the ability to see small trends and issues and deal with them before they become big issues and problems down the track.
What are the opportunities and challenges that some of these QSR operators are facing now?
We see two critical challenges that QSRs face in the coming years. The first one’s around how brands will be able to quickly drive change throughout the organisation. The second part to that is around how brands can actually validate that stores are actually doing what they should be doing when they should be doing it.
How does Squizify help these restaurant operators take advantage of these opportunities?
We see ourselves as more of a data company than a digital food safety compliance company per se. We enable small food businesses to capture key market datasets when it comes down to food safety on a regular basis. We believe firmly that if you're capturing and monitoring what matters most in your business, more often, you're going to see these issues arise in advance and be able to deal with them before they become big problems.
We see ourselves more as an ‘insurance policy’ so to speak, helping brands across networks reduce their risk whilst at the same time, improving the profitability and operational excellence of their stores as a whole.
What three major trends are you seeing/focused on this year?
We still believe there's going to be a lot of winners and losers over the next 12 months in the food space, given the uncertainty around lockdowns and COVID. We think brands that have the ability to move quickly, that are nimble, and can make changes on the fly will be ones that really do win the trust of the customers moving forward and ultimately are the ones that will win more business.
We see a big opportunity for brands to re-evaluate how to do things; look for ways to improve operational efficiencies which ultimately gives the franchisees the ability to make more profit and be a happier franchise network.
A key goal for Squizify is specifically around adding more value to our customers. We want to make sure that we can combine existing platforms then absorb them into one platform to make sure that they are really adding value to the customers and reducing the workload that franchise has on a daily basis. We do a lot of links and connections into existing platforms. So the idea is to be the one-stop shop when it comes down to food safety and the broader operations of the restaurant.
Watch the full interview here:
If you are a QSR owner who wants to explore what Squizify has to offer, get in touch with the Squizify team here or email [email protected].
