Taste of Success
City of Frisco
Setting Standards
As a growing city, Frisco wants to find a way to set higher standards for its restaurants. To maintain a high standard, Frisco partnered with the Chamber of Commerce and asked us to look for ways to help incentivize restaurants to increase their sanitation scores on their inspections and create community.
Defining Standards
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Identify pain points in the current sanitation system
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Research ranking systems
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Interview Specialists
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Creating prototypes
Educating the Public
We analyzed Frisco’s current sanitation scoring system and evaluated how it could be portrayed in a way that easily communicates and educates the public. We also identified ways to ensure that restaurant owners keep up with their responsibilities of educating employees on sanitation.
Creating Competition
Using the UYL system for competitions, we planned a medal system that would group restaurants in a category and allow them to compete with other restaurants within that category and share knowledge with other restaurants.
Overview
As a student researcher, I worked in a five-person team to help identify ways to improve restaurant sanitation scores in the city of Frisco.
Frisco restaurant start
As a growing city, the city of Frisco wanted to be able to:
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Set a standard for restaurant sanitation
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Educate the public
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Create a community between the City of Frisco and other restaurants
Some challenges were that there was a limitation to reform Frisco’s complex sanitation code leaving restaurants feeling unmotivated to try to understand it. Also at the time Covid-19 was affecting restaurant operations.
Measuring Restaurant Performance
Average of demerits for Frisco’s restaurant sanitation score. The closer the number is to 0, the better. Very few restaurants score below 30 which qualifies for “failing”.
Overall, Frisco’s restaurants were performing highly, however in order to improve it even further, we had to figure out why and what kind of restaurants are lingering towards the tail end of the spectrum. I interviewed a few restaurant owners from both the lower and higher end of the spectrum and a health inspector.
What I found was that those that are getting more demerits to their sanitation score were mom-and-pop restaurants and those getting less, were chain restaurants.
Creating Awareness
Originally, we wanted to create awareness of this information through visuals. I researched the medal/award system Frisco could use to convey a restaurant's sanitation score easily. A couple of systems used for inspiration were Singapore (China) and The Colony (TX) sanitation system.
We believed that making this information public would incentivize restaurants to improve their sanitation scores. However, the issue with this solution was that it could deter business from those lower ranking, more specifically those mom-and-pop restaurants, which could make them feel targeted.
Leveling Playing-field
In order to not attack the business of these restaurants, we first determined why chain restaurants scored better than mom-and-pop restaurants.
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Our previous interviews concluded that chain restaurants have the resources to consistently train, test, and create a standard for their employees to follow, whereas mom-and-pop restaurants do not.
To help begin leveling the playing field, we believe that, with the City of Frisco’s partnership with the Chamber of Commerce, they can offer education courses, training, testing, etc. For these smaller restaurants to use.
Determining Rank
One method I researched was the UYL competition system, which is what schools use to determine who they are competing with and what rank they are based on the population of the school and how good their performance is.
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Based on their averages, restaurants would be given gold, silver, or bronze medal brackets. This way, competition between restaurants is less direct and cutthroat.
Visualizing Rank
After we set up how restaurants would compete, I created the visuals for how each restaurant would display its bracket
Completing the Package
Our solution was to incentivize restaurants by bridging the gap between mom-and-pop and chain restaurants in education through the Chamber of Commerce, creating awareness of restaurant sanitation through the medal system, and helping create community through a more friendly competition.
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