NSF TraQtion® Helps Red Robin to Innovate

Nicole Jones, Quality and Commercialization Manager at Red Robin restaurants, is responsible for product noncompliance and vendor compliance programs. Watch as she shares her experience of selecting a compliance solution.

“Red Robin currently has about 600 restaurants in the United States, and we have approximately 20 in Canada. At Red Robin, we try to be very innovative. We have four menu runs each year. For each menu run, we bring in new ingredients and new suppliers. That means that we must get all those suppliers and ingredients approved for quality.

“It’s a very big challenge to keep up with our quality innovations. Currently, we have about 240 SKUs, or food specifications, in our system. And that equals about 300 manufacturing facilities that produce these items that we’re trying to manage. So it can get very complex. This is why we looked to move toward digital, to help us manage all this data and ensure that we’re staying in compliance.

“We were looking for a solution to help us manage all this data. We were using spreadsheets that are not easy to use. It’s very time-consuming. They don’t provide us the output we need — it was a lot more additional work to try to figure out those scorecards or outputs we needed on our vendors. With moving toward NSF TraQtion®, they do all the footwork for us.

“With NSF TraQtion®, at a click of a button we’re able to see real, live data and where our vendors are as far as score carding, and that’s just a great feature to have. NSF TraQtion® supplier management is not only managing our vendor compliance, but the product specification module is managing all of our product noncompliance. And NSF TraQtion® product quality is also going to manage our product evaluation program. So with those three components, we’re really going to be able to get a true scorecard as to which of our suppliers or products are outlying and which we really need to focus on to get back up to compliance. This just makes us a better-quality team, and we’re just so excited to have NSF TraQtion®.”