Today's Article

CNN Anchor: We've all seen these signs in restaurants telling employees to wash their hands. But is the person making your food actually doing that? It's an important question, not just for the customers, but for the business too. After all, dirty hands touching food can lead to food-related 3illnesses, forcing a restaurant to 4shut down 5temporarily, or even 6for good. 

Christine Schindler, CEO, Pathspot: I think that especially in today's world, the 7heightened 8awareness on why contamination is present in our world and our own 9personal objectives as well as responsibility in stopping the spread of illness is more 10apparent than ever. 

CNN Anchor: Here at Just Salad, a restaurant with more than 80 franchises, the company showed CNN how it's 11implementing 12food safety technology that it hopes will lower the risk of 13food-borne illnesses such as E. Coli, Norovirus, and Salmonella. One of its new tools is this hand scanner, 14developed by New York-based Pathspot. The device scans employees' hands for contamination each time they wash and can 15detect gut biomolecules in just seconds. 

Rafael Butle: And this is what you should do. You need to get in the 16cracks in these little 17crevices here inside the palm. And the nails especially is where we see a lot of times people miss rinsing properly. Turn it off. And then you come over to the hand scanner. Put your hands underneath. It'll let you know exactly when to 18flip. And then it'll let you know you passed. 

Christine Schindler: That data flow then translates back to management teams. So they're able to see in real time, are we hitting our required hand washes? If we had a spike in hand washing contaminations, what actually caused that? 

Rafael Butle: When you come here and you go to 'stand activity', it's going to let me know how many times each day they're washing their hands. Scroll up. It'll let me know how successful they are here. All the systems combined help us just monitor everything and make sure everything's working properly. And it allows us not to be in the store all the time and be able to monitor it without being actually physically present. 

CNN Anchor: While that might sound like micromanaging, the 19CDC has found that in the past, restaurant employees are more likely to properly wash their hands when managers 20emphasize its importance. 

Rafael Butle: Our team members can wash their hands for 20 seconds, but we can find out where they're missing and coach our team on how to do better. 

CNN Anchor: Pathspot's technology, which the company says is being used in roughly 10,000 food service locations worldwide, aims to 21take that a step further.