If you’ve followed GBA Solutions for a while, you’ll know we spend most of our time building bespoke systems for Irish businesses. Custom apps, workflow automation, internal tools that replace spreadsheets and paper. Every project is different, shaped by the specific needs of the client.
But every now and then, a project comes along that feels like it should be a product. Something that solves a problem so common that it makes sense to build it once and offer it to everyone.
That’s exactly what happened with temperature monitoring.
This post is the story of how we went from “we should probably build this” to launching a fully integrated 24/7 temperature monitoring system for Irish restaurants, hotels, care homes, and food businesses. It’s now available through SmartChef.ie.
Why Temperature Monitoring?
SmartChef is a digital HACCP and food safety compliance app which we built and manage as a joint venture with Food Safety Management Solutions. It’s designed to replace the paper-based Safe Catering Pack that Irish kitchens are required to maintain. Delivery logs, temperature checks, cooking records, cleaning schedules, all digitised and stored in the cloud.
One of the core features is temperature recording. Staff open the app, select a fridge or freezer, and log the temperature. Simple enough. But here’s the thing: that only works when someone’s there to do it.
What about overnight? What about weekends when the restaurant is closed?
If a freezer fails at 2am on a Sunday, nobody knows until Monday morning when the head chef walks in to find €3,000 worth of stock at room temperature. By then, it’s too late. The food is spoiled, the records show a gap, and the next EHO inspection is going to involve some awkward questions.
We kept hearing the same thing from SmartChef users: “Can you add something that monitors temperatures automatically? Something that alerts us if there’s a problem?”
So we built a fridge temperature alarm and freezer alert system that actually works.
The Problem We Set Out to Solve
Before diving into the build, we spent time understanding exactly what Irish food businesses needed. Not what the enterprise solutions offer (those are often overkill for a restaurant or care home) but what would actually work in practice for food safety compliance in Ireland.
Here’s what we heard:
- 24/7 coverage: temperatures need to be logged around the clock, not just during opening hours
- Alerts that actually reach people: email alone isn’t enough when it’s 3am and your phone is on silent
- No false alarms: a quick spike when the fridge door opens during service shouldn’t trigger a panic
- HACCP-compliant temperature records: the data needs to be timestamped, tamper-proof, and available for inspections
- Affordable: enterprise cold chain monitoring systems can cost thousands, and most Irish food businesses can’t justify that
- Simple to install: no electricians, no network engineers, no complicated setup
We also knew from experience that whatever we built had to integrate seamlessly with SmartChef. Remote temperature monitoring shouldn’t be a separate system with its own login and its own reports. It should just work. Open SmartChef, see your temperatures. Get an alert, see it in the same app you use for everything else.
Choosing the Hardware
One of the first decisions was whether to build our own hardware or partner with an established manufacturer.
Building custom hardware is expensive, time-consuming, and risky. You’re dealing with manufacturing, certification, supply chains, firmware updates. All things that distract from what we’re actually good at, which is software.
So we went looking for a hardware partner.
After evaluating several options, we settled on ETI, a UK-based manufacturer with decades of experience in commercial temperature monitoring. Their ThermaData WiFi loggers are used in food service, pharmaceuticals, and cold chain logistics across the world.
Why ETI?
- Proven reliability: these aren’t consumer gadgets; they’re built for commercial kitchen environments
- WiFi connectivity: no need for proprietary gateways or hubs; the wireless temperature sensors connect directly to the kitchen’s existing WiFi
- Local data storage: if the WiFi drops, readings are stored on the device and sync automatically when connectivity returns
- Open API: we could integrate directly with SmartChef rather than relying on a third-party dashboard
- Battery powered: no mains wiring required; sensors can be installed in minutes
The hardware is sold outright, not rented. That was important to us. We didn’t want customers locked into a lease or worried about returning equipment. You buy the sensor, it’s yours.
The Integration Challenge
Hardware sorted, the next challenge was integration. How do you take temperature readings from a WiFi temperature sensor and turn them into something useful inside SmartChef?
The flow looks something like this:
- The ETI sensor takes a reading every 5 minutes
- It sends the data to ETI’s cloud servers via WiFi
- SmartChef pulls the data from ETI’s API at regular intervals
- The reading is stored in the SmartChef database, linked to the correct kitchen and fridge or freezer
- If the temperature is outside the safe range for a sustained period, the alerting system kicks in
Sounds straightforward, but there were plenty of details to work through.
Mapping sensors to equipment
Each kitchen in SmartChef has its own list of equipment: Walk-in Fridge, Chest Freezer, Display Unit, and so on. We needed a way to link a physical sensor to the right piece of equipment in the app. This is handled during setup: the customer tells us the sensor’s serial number and which fridge it’s monitoring, and we configure the mapping on our end.
Handling connectivity issues
WiFi in kitchens isn’t always reliable. Thick walls, metal equipment, interference from other devices. There are plenty of reasons a sensor might lose connectivity. We built in monitoring for this. If a sensor goes offline, SmartChef knows about it and can alert the customer. When connectivity returns, all the stored readings sync automatically.
Avoiding false alarms
This was one of the trickiest parts. Temperature fluctuations are normal in a working kitchen. Every time someone opens a fridge door, the temperature spikes. Every time a delivery comes in, the walk-in warms up temporarily. If we alerted on every spike, customers would learn to ignore the alerts, and then they’d miss the real problems.
We implemented sustained breach detection. A single high reading doesn’t trigger an alert. Instead, SmartChef waits to see if the temperature stays outside the safe zone for an extended period. Only then does it escalate. This dramatically reduces false alarms while still catching genuine issues.
Multi-Channel Alerting
When there is a real problem, the temperature breach alert needs to reach someone. Not tomorrow. Not when they next check their email. Now.
We built multi-channel alerting into the system from the start:
- SMS alerts: text messages that cut through, even at 3am
- Email alerts: for those who prefer inbox notifications
- App notifications: push alerts to the SmartChef app on iOS and Android
- Voice calls: coming soon; for the most critical alerts, we’ll actually call you
The idea is simple: we make every reasonable attempt to contact you when something goes wrong. If you miss the SMS, you might catch the email. If you miss the email, the app notification might get through. And if all else fails, the voice call will wake you up.
Customers can configure who receives alerts. Maybe the head chef for the first notification, with escalation to the manager if there’s no response after 30 minutes.
HACCP Compliance Built In
Temperature monitoring isn’t just about stock protection. It’s also about food safety compliance. Environmental Health Officers expect to see temperature records, and those records need to be credible for FSAI and HACCP requirements.
With automated temperature logging, the records are:
- Timestamped: every reading has a precise date and time
- Tamper-proof: the data is what it is; you can’t go back and “fix” a bad reading
- Complete: no gaps because someone forgot to log the temps on a busy Friday night
- Exportable: pull up any date range and export it as a PDF for inspection
EHOs generally love this. It’s exactly what they want to see: evidence that temperatures are being monitored consistently, with a clear audit trail of any breaches and how they were resolved.
What We Learned Building a Product vs. Bespoke
Most of what we do at GBA Solutions is bespoke development. A client has a specific problem, we build a specific solution. The scope is defined, the requirements are clear (or become clear through discovery), and the project has an end date.
Building a product is different.
With a product, you’re not building for one client. You’re building for a category of clients. That means thinking about edge cases you haven’t encountered yet. It means building in flexibility without overcomplicating things. It means documentation, support processes, onboarding flows.
A few things we learned along the way:
Start with the integration, not the features
The most important thing about our commercial kitchen temperature monitoring system is that it lives inside SmartChef. If we’d built it as a standalone product, it would have been much less valuable. The integration is the feature.
Hardware partnerships require trust
When you’re relying on someone else’s hardware, you’re trusting them with your reputation. If the sensors fail, customers blame you, not the manufacturer. We spent a lot of time evaluating ETI before committing. Their track record gave us confidence.
Alerting is harder than it looks
Anyone can send an alert. The hard part is sending the right alert at the right time to the right person. Too many alerts and people ignore them. Too few and you miss problems. Getting this balance right took several iterations.
Support is part of the product
With bespoke projects, support is often ad-hoc. With a product, it needs to be systematic. We built a setup process, created documentation, and trained ourselves on the common questions customers ask. This is ongoing work. Every new customer teaches us something.
Who Is This For?
We built this for Irish food businesses that can’t afford to lose stock or miss a temperature breach. That includes:
- Restaurants: especially those with valuable stock in walk-in freezers
- Hotels: multiple kitchens, multiple fridges, often spread across a large site
- Care homes: where food safety is non-negotiable and compliance is closely monitored
- Schools and hospitals: institutional kitchens with strict regulatory requirements
- Pubs and cafes: smaller operations that still need to protect their stock
- Catering companies: often operating from commissary kitchens managing cold chain monitoring without constant staff presence
If you’re currently doing manual temperature checks twice a day and hoping nothing goes wrong overnight, this is for you.
How to Get Started
The temperature monitoring system is available now through SmartChef.ie.
The hardware is a one-time purchase. You buy the sensors outright, they’re yours to keep. The monitoring service is a monthly subscription that covers cloud storage, alerting, and support.
Setup is straightforward. We’ll help you configure the sensors, map them to your equipment in SmartChef, and test the alerts. Most installations are up and running within a day.
If you’re already a SmartChef customer, adding temperature monitoring is seamless. It just appears in your existing dashboard. If you’re new to SmartChef, temperature monitoring is a great reason to make the switch to digital HACCP.
Final Thoughts
Building a product is different from building bespoke software, but the fundamentals are the same: understand the problem, design a solution that actually works for real people, and iterate based on feedback.
Temperature monitoring started as a feature request from SmartChef users. It turned into a product that we’re genuinely proud of. One that solves a real problem for Irish food businesses and fits naturally into the compliance workflows they’re already using.
If you’re interested in learning more, head over to SmartChef.ie/temperature-monitoring or get in touch with us directly. We’re always happy to chat.
FAQ
Is this only for SmartChef customers?
The full integration, with temperatures appearing in your HACCP records and alerts managed through the SmartChef app, requires a SmartChef subscription. However, if you’re interested in temperature monitoring without the full HACCP system, get in touch and we can discuss options.
What hardware do I need for WiFi temperature monitoring?
We supply ETI ThermaData WiFi loggers. Each logger comes with a temperature probe, protective cover, and magnetic mount. You’ll need WiFi coverage where the sensors are installed.
How many temperature sensors do I need?
One sensor per fridge or freezer you want to monitor. Most restaurants start with 2-4 sensors covering their main cold storage units.
What if my WiFi is unreliable?
The sensors store readings locally if they lose connectivity. When WiFi returns, everything syncs automatically. You’ll also get an alert if a sensor goes offline, so you can investigate.
Can I install the temperature sensors myself?
Yes. The sensors are battery powered and attach magnetically. No wiring required. We provide setup instructions and remote support.
How much does WiFi temperature monitoring cost in Ireland?
The hardware is a one-time purchase (pricing depends on configuration), and the monitoring service is a monthly subscription. Full pricing is available on the SmartChef temperature monitoring page.
Do Environmental Health Officers accept digital temperature records?
Yes. Environmental Health Officers generally prefer digital records because they’re timestamped, tamper-proof, and complete. Automated monitoring is exactly what they want to see.