The motto of the team service stations, belonging to the team Group, is “More than refuelling”. The product range offered in the roughly 70 complete stations which the company operates in addition to its automated stations, is accordingly varied. Car and truck drivers in equal measure above all appreciate the extensive bistro and food service offer. From hot dishes to cold snacks, right up to the ever-present coffee to go, no wish is left unfulfilled. In order to provide the customers with excellent product quality and absolute food safety – and to make doing so as easy as possible for the on-site staff – team relies on the digital quality management solution testo Saveris Food Stores.
The team Group is a German commercial enterprise with the business areas of service stations, hardware stores, and energy, building material and lubricant trade. There are currently more than 2700 employees working at over 290 sites for the Süderbrarup-based company. The team service stations are a permanent fixture of the picture on the street, especially in North Germany. In 2018, the team Group generated a turnover of over 1.6 billion Euros. 75 % are from the energy trade sector, which also includes the service stations.
Even if food and beverages do not represent the core products of the team service stations, their quality and safety are indispensable for an impeccable customer experience – especially when speed is of the essence, and the service station is actually only an intermediate stop on the way from A to B.
The majority of team service stations are not operated by the company itself but by partners. However, the quality regulations, with all processes and temperature limit values, are created by team headquarters. Manual and paper-based monitoring and on-site checking of all quality-relevant parameters of the service stations’ bistro and restaurant product proved too labour-intensive in the long run. In order to make adhering to the central food safety guidelines as easy as possible for the partners, Quality Assurance management decided to monitor all refrigeration units and food-relevant gastronomic equipment digitally, and to store the measurement data automatically – including alarms in the case of limit value violations.
Since there are usually only two to three employees working in a service station and dealing with measurement technology should not be one of their main tasks, it was absolutely necessary that the solution used should be firstly intuitive to use, and secondly accompanied by an extensive support and service provision. testo Saveris Food Stores was able to fulfil all these requirements, which is why team service stations decided on the complete solution from Testo.
The very preventively focused, digital complete solution testo Saveris Food Stores was developed especially for the particular food safety challenges in supermarkets, service stations and convenience stores.
With its proven combination of reliable sensors, intuitively operable software and a service offer which is as extensive as it is individual, it ensures more transparency, safe compliance, reduced costs and increased efficiency. Quality-relevant measurement values such as temperature and cooking oil quality in % TPM are precisely recorded and securely stored in the Cloud by portable (e.g. cooking oil tester, penetration thermometer) and stationary measurement technology (data loggers). In addition to this, the corresponding checklists and quality checks are stored in the Control Unit. Should a check result or a measured value not meet the specifications, previously defined corrective actions clearly and unambiguously communicate what needs to be done.
Apart from this, a web dashboard allows access to the data in the Cloud – at any time and from anywhere. This is particularly useful for comparing the data from several sites and for comprehensive analyses. Via the dashboard, new quality regulations and processes are also centrally created and rolled out to all connected service stations at the touch of a button.
“testo Saveris Food Stores perfectly meets our requirements for a digital quality management system: Its handling is really easy, it simplifies our work considerably, and the cooperation with Testo on this project was faultless. I would recommend the solution to a colleague any time.”
Knud Schröder
·(Bistro & Gastronomy Consultant, Business Unit Service Stations, team energie GmbH & Co. KG)
The customers were already impressed in the test phase, above all by the automatic temperature monitoring of all refrigeration units (bistro counter, salad bar, chest freezer, deep-freezers and refrigerators), and the monitoring of the food temperatures in hot food service using the combined infrared and penetration thermometer testo 104-IR BT. The centrally stored temperature limit values for the refrigeration and deep-freeze units, and the alarms in cases of limit value violations gave the responsible people the certainty that the product temperatures were in order round the clock. In addition to the time savings gained by the elimination of manual temperature checks, the easy testing of cooking oil quality as well as the digital transfer of all measurement values to the Control Unit and Cloud made the staff’s jobs easier.
The testo Saveris Food Stores digital checklists are used in incoming goods among others, in order to record suppliers and to check and document temperatures, sell-by dates as well as the appearance of the delivered products.
This way, every service station benefits from an increase in food safety, without the need to provide additional resources. testo Saveris Food Stores is seamlessly integrated into day-to-day business, and after a short time, is hardly noticed anymore. In addition, the support provided by Testo experts during installation and set-up of the solution was welcomed by the users.