First Watch Advances Food Safety, Reduces Response Time for Recalls

Learn how First Watch is transforming "Daytime Dining" with preventive food safety practices resulting in a 10x reduction of withdrawal times during mock recalls.

Sometimes a restaurant concept comes along that just feels right; it’s a place where customers want to be. That’s First Watch.

This high-growth daytime restaurant serves made-to-order breakfast, brunch and lunch with a focus on fresh ingredients (you won’t find fryers, microwaves or heat lamps here). A recipient of more than 300 local “Best Breakfast” and “Best Brunch” accolades, First Watch offers traditional favorites, such as pancakes, omelets, sandwiches and salads, alongside a variety of specialty items, like Farm Stand Breakfast Tacos and the Power Breakfast Quinoa Bowl. Doors open from 7 am to 2:30 pm each day at each of its more than 365 restaurants.

“We pride ourselves on our unique and elevated approach to daytime dining. Each First Watch restaurant uses high quality, fresh ingredients.  We have to ensure that these quality standards are met every day,” says Jasmine Hagan, Senior Quality Assurance Manager.

“We’ve been experiencing some major growth and were looking for a supply chain management solution to exceed industry standards to ensure First Watch stays on the forefront of quality assurance and food safety.  We had an extensive list of requirements for a solutions platform. These requirements not only included quality assurance functionality to improve our efficiency and accuracy, quality record collection and documentation; we also wanted to improve supplier collaboration and our own internal processes and to make sure we protect our brand by lowering supply chain risk.  After vetting many different supplier management options, we chose FoodLogiQ for their robust solutions platform.” 

First Watch selected Manage + Monitor for their supplier quality assurance program and Recall + Response to help manage their recall program. 

“One of the many reasons we chose FoodLogiQ was that we wanted to improve our recall program by communicating quickly and efficiently with our restaurants during a recall or withdrawal,” explains Hagan. “We were extremely impressed with FoodLogiQ’s capabilities; there are very few solutions on the market today that have the same functionality.”

As part of their FoodLogiQ Connect implementation, First Watch hosted a series of mock recalls to test the system. Following that process, Hagan had some impressive metrics to report:

• 87% of First Watch restaurants completed the mock withdrawal within two (2) hours of notification.  A few weeks prior, 84% of restaurants had completed a withdrawal within 24 hours of notification (not using FoodLogiQ).  
• Within four (4) hours of notification, 97% of restaurants had completed the withdrawal.
• 100% completion of withdrawal within 24 hours of notification.
• Statistics continue to improve; the most recent recall initiated resulted in 100% completion of product within 2 hours.

“It’s all about continuous improvement, collaboration and transparency.” says Hagan. “First Watch is committed to quality assurance, and we strive to provide the highest level of food safety to maintain trust with our customers. FoodLogiQ provides a platform to facilitate this.” 

Learn how you can execute a mock withdrawal to help with you become more recall ready at our upcoming demo, How to Cut Your Recall Solution Time in Half Using Mock Recalls.