Announcing a cloud-based and app-driven platform to automate food labeling for restaurants, retail food service, and non-commercial kitchens

The reputation of a kitchen lies in the hands of the chef. And with the widespread food safety incidents, and the presence of allergens and usage of additives, chefs now rely extensively on the product information systems to ensure high standards of their kitchens. Labeling, therefore, plays a role more crucial than ever before in the foodservice industry. Building on a long history of business innovation, DayMark Safety Systems now introduces an automated labeling workflow for kitchens. Sonata Software has helped DayMark execute this vision and bring digital technologies to many kitchens in the US.

     (Logo: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/689012/Sonata_Software_Logo.jpg )

A new era in labeling technology

From its inception in 1989, DayMark has been a leader in food safety systems. Craig Dixon, DayMark’s CEO, has been upping the innovation game through a portfolio of products to address the needs of the packaged foods industry. With the launch of the MenuCommand web portal and MenuPilot mobile app, kitchen staff is freed from their laborious and error-prone manual management of menu data and food labels. They can now streamline menu updates, shelf life, nutritional facts, allergen information, preparation information, recipes and training information to a cloud-based application from virtually anytime, anywhere.

With the Matt85 hardware system (which includes a direct thermal printer and a customized Android tablet that runs MenuPilot), DayMark’s innovation extends to the printing needs of the kitchen. By providing hardware along with the software solution, DayMark has simplified the overall label printing process. Jeff Gayer, EVP of Product Development & Marketing at DayMark, says, “We feel that, through kitchen automation, we’ll be able to build solutions that help our businesses run better, safer, more efficiently and through a common dashboard.”

Digital comes to the kitchen

With the cloud-hosted, multilingual MenuCommand system, foodservice operators can centrally upload menu updates, which are seamlessly downloaded in their kitchens via MenuPilot. Through Bluetooth integration with the Matt85 printers, labeling now becomes a breeze: labeling information is managed centrally, with access-controlled distribution and audit trails for printing, as desired.

Furthermore, integration with third-party systems such as Nutritics helps leverage a database of ingredients to easily build and manage recipe data. “It’s difficult to ask a prep cook in a fast-paced foodservice environment to consistently recall the correct hold times and shelf life of food items required to create a multitude of changing menu selections,” says Jill Carte, Category Manager of Kitchen Automation at DayMark.

A partnership to foster digital

To build this solution, DayMark relied on Sonata Software, who built the technology backbone of the solution. A Microsoft solution partner and mobility expert, Sonata complemented the business vision of DayMark with its technology prowess. Sonata built the backend solution of MenuCommand on Microsoft’s Azure platform while the MenuPilot application was built for customized Android tablets. MenuPilot connects to the backend via Sonata’s Halosys platform.

A future vision

The solution of a modularized label printing system brings the benefits of digital technology to the kitchen. “The DayMark solution helped us check all of our boxes: saving us time, ensuring food-labelling compliance and seeing a return on our investment in six to nine months, depending on the volumes of business done at our different locations,” says Brent Courson, Executive Chef at Main Street Ventures, a network of 20+ restaurants.

The coming together of DayMark, Sonata, and Microsoft to drive this program has helped start a journey that will not only help DayMark’s customer base of more than 35,000 kitchens, but also sets a standard in packaged food labeling.