Frequently Asked Questions
Answers to the questions we hear most from compliance, quality, and plant-operations teams.
Compliance & Records
Under FSIS regulation 9 CFR 417.5(e), records for slaughter activities and refrigerated products must be retained for at least one year, and records for frozen, preserved, or shelf-stable products for at least two years. Records may be stored off-site after six months only if they can be produced on-site within 24 hours of an FSIS request. ChirpDat retains your complete monitoring history for the life of your service and generates any date range on demand — so a records request is answered in minutes, not scrambled for in 24 hours. Where the data lives, who can see it, and how you get it back are set out on our security and data page.
Yes. 9 CFR 417.5(d) explicitly permits records maintained on computers, provided appropriate controls ensure the integrity of the electronic data and signatures. That integrity requirement is exactly what ChirpDat is built for: every reading is time-stamped at capture, stored tamper-evident, and every report carries a cryptographic integrity hash so any after-the-fact alteration is detectable.
FSIS requires records documenting the monitoring of critical control points and their critical limits — including actual times and temperatures, the calibration of process-monitoring instruments, corrective actions taken in response to deviations, and verification results, each dated (9 CFR 417.5(a)(3)). ChirpDat produces the times, temperatures, calibration documentation, and dated event history automatically; your team documents corrective actions against alerts that are already on the record.
A tamper-evident record is one that cannot be altered, backdated, or deleted after it is captured without the change being detectable. Non-repudiation means no one — including the facility itself — can later dispute when a reading was taken or what it said. Paper logs and editable spreadsheets offer neither. ChirpDat time-stamps every reading at the moment of measurement, stores it in tamper-evident form, and issues every report with a cryptographic integrity hash so later alteration is detectable — records that stand up to an inspector, an insurer, or a dispute.
State meat inspection programs must be “at least equal to” federal FSIS requirements, so state-inspected plants generally face the same record-keeping expectations, and many state programs audit temperature logs just as closely. If you’re unsure what your state program expects, ask us — we work with state-inspected processors and can point you to your program’s requirements.
Calibration
NIST-traceable calibration means a sensor’s accuracy has been verified against a reference standard with an unbroken chain of comparisons back to the National Institute of Standards and Technology. It matters because FSIS record requirements include the calibration of process-monitoring instruments — an inspector can ask how you know your thermometer is right. An uncalibrated sensor is an opinion; a NIST-traceable sensor is evidence.
Annually. Every year, ChirpDat’s Compliance Assurance plan ships a freshly NIST-calibrated reference sensor to your facility, and your calibration documentation is updated so it’s ready the moment an auditor asks for it.
Alerts
Yes. ChirpDat sends alerts by SMS text, voice call, email, and webhook. Critical alerts place a voice call that repeats until a human acknowledges it — because a 2 AM freezer failure needs a phone that rings, not an email that waits until morning.
A warning alert is an early heads-up: a reading has crossed your warning threshold and stayed there for the time you specify — it notifies your chosen team by SMS and email. A critical alert means a critical limit has been crossed: it escalates by voice call and keeps escalating until someone acknowledges it. You set both thresholds, the sustain time, and who gets alerted, for every monitored point.
Every alert rule includes a sustain time — the condition must remain true for the number of minutes you set before an alert fires. A cooler door open for 30 seconds during loading is normal; open for 10 minutes, it’s an event. You tune thresholds and sustain times per zone, and we help you set values that match your HACCP plan.
Yes. ChirpDat’s webhook channel pushes alert and event data in real time to any system that accepts an HTTP request — ERP, CMMS/maintenance software, building automation, or a custom endpoint. Your monitoring data doesn’t have to live in one more silo.
Reporting
Daily, monthly, and annual compliance reports (annual summary is delivered with the Compliance Assurance renewal), delivered automatically by email, at the detail level you choose: summary (daily min/max/average per zone), standard (hourly readings plus every threshold event), or full record (every reading, every event — the densest audit trail). Any custom date range can be generated on demand in one click. You can view a sample daily report here.
You open your dashboard, select the date range they ask for, and hand them a signed report — complete, continuous, and impossible to backdate. What used to be a two-day paper chase becomes a two-minute task.
Installation & Operations
Your entire kit — sensors, gateway, everything — is configured, paired, labeled by zone, and bench-tested before it ships. You mount the sensors following an illustrated placement guide, text us photos before permanent mounting, and we verify signal coverage remotely, zone by zone. No technician visits your facility, no production interruption, and most facilities are live within days of the kit arriving.
Yes. White-glove onsite installation is available for facilities that prefer hands-on deployment: we place and mount every sensor, validate coverage zone by zone, and train your staff on the floor. Most customers choose zero-touch; complex or multi-building facilities sometimes prefer onsite. Both are quoted up front.
It doesn’t have to touch your network at all — the standard deployment uses a cellular gateway with its own data plan, which most plant IT departments prefer. Sensors also store readings locally and retransmit when connectivity returns, so a network outage doesn’t create a gap in your compliance record. And if we lose contact with your gateway, you get a “we can’t see your plant” alert — you’ll know about an outage before it can cost you.
Temperature (ambient, cooler/freezer, and food-grade insertion probes), humidity, door and access events, equipment current (including compressor-stopped detection), water leak (spot and zone), gas detection including ammonia, CO2 and air quality, tank and bin level, pipe pressure, and power state. We’re hardware-agnostic — we deploy industrial sensors from multiple manufacturers, so you’re never locked into a single vendor’s ecosystem.
Pricing
ChirpDat deployment starts at $425 per monitored point (including industrial sensor hardware, configuration, testing, documentation, and remote go-live) plus $3,900 per gateway. Volume pricing is available for facilities above 100 monitored points. Ongoing monitoring is $25 per monitored point per month with an $895 monthly minimum, and the annual Compliance Assurance plan — software updates, patches, and a fresh NIST-calibrated reference sensor each year — is $2,500. A typical 50-point facility runs about $25,000 one-time and $1,250 per month. You can price your own facility in about three minutes with our Build Your Own Monitoring tool, and see the system live in a 15-minute demo before committing.
Yes — book a 15-minute live screen-share demo. You’ll see a real compliance dashboard on live data, real alerts, and a real audit report generated in front of you, so you can judge exactly what you’re buying before spending a dollar.