Michigan restaurants can reopen inside again, but the state has mandated restrictions in hopes of keeping dining rooms from becoming COVID-19 superspreading hubs.
Two of the requirements include collecting information from customers for contact tracing purposes and doing a daily health screening on all employees.
New technology from Midland-based company BYOD helps restaurants do both.
BYOD has partnered with the Michigan Restaurant and Lodging Association to give its Guest Protect and Temp Protect technologies to all MRLA members for free. Non-members can get the tools for $25 each, per month.
Guest Protect allows customers to take a photo of a QR code, then fill out their basic information at their table. The data is encrypted and stored via Amazon Web Services Cloud storage.
The form takes about 20 seconds to fill out, and shows a “finished” screen for customers to show their server. It can also direct users to the restaurant’s website, said BYOD CEO Dave Dittenber.
The information is only viewed if there’s a COVID outbreak at the restaurant and the health department is looking to warn people potentially exposed.
By doing it electronically, it prevents congestion at the front of a restaurant and lightens the load on hosts.
Dittenber also owns four restaurants in Midland and Bay City: Old City Hall, American Kitchen, Tavern 101 and Molasses – which started using the tools this fall before the Nov. 18 dine-in ban started.
“For us, it was so much more convenient to not have more pieces of paper floating around that we needed to take care of,” Dittenber said.
The other tool is called “Temp Protect,” which is an app for employees, so they can take a five-question survey every day to do the state-required health screening. The technology can connect to Bluetooth thermometers, or the number can be entered manually from traditional thermometers.
BYOD is a new company and is looking to launch its main “Virtual Restaurant Manager” tool later in 2021. It pivoted to creating the contact tracing and health screening tools when the pandemic hit.
Dittenber is on the MRLA board of trustees. The MRLA isn’t paying BYOD to provide the tools to its members – it’s part of a mutual marketing agreement, Dittenber said.
The company is in talks with other state’s restaurant associations as well as in-state and out-of-state universities interested in the technology, he said.
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