Hi all,
I have a related question for you wonderful FS gurus.
We are a very small facility which makes a wide range of sandwiches based on customer orders (ie: we can make between 1 - 250 of each flavour of sandwich).
In our production room where we make the packaged sandwiches etc, we have a couple of open fronted chillers that we store various ingredients in, such as RTE meats, cheese, lettuce, sauces etc.
Currently our procedure is to check the temperature of each chiller twice per day using an infra red thermometer/gun. Currently the staff do this by aiming it at the interior back wall of the chiller on each shelf. Obviously this will show that it is out of specification during a defrost cycle.
I have requested that staff open a food container on each shelf and take the temperature of the food directly, however this doesn't allow for the temperature variations while the food is being taken out of the chiller during use then put back in.
We can't afford a fancy permanent digital monitoring system, but I do occasionally put a datalogger in the chiller to verify the temperatures.
Would anyone have any recommendations of an analogue thermometer that could be placed into some type of medium which would replicate the food core temperatures and not the variable defrost temps? What medium would work, given that it will be beside food. (In a previous job in a micro lab, I had used sand or glycol as a medium - For food, I was wondering about something like rice which wouldn't be a huge issue if it got knocked over)
The same question applies for our freezers where currently the temperature is read from the digital display on the wall which does not reflect the actual food temperature.
Thanks in advance.