Restaurant CCTV monitoring: know before the EHO does

Kitchens rarely fail an inspection on something that happened that day. The gloves that come off in the rush, the prep left uncovered at close, the droppings along the floor edge at 3am: all of it was visible for weeks, usually to a camera nobody has the hours to watch. A single failed environmental-health inspection can close a food business on the spot (UK Food Standards Agency enforcement guidance). The footage exists. The watching doesn't.

What Svid watches for in a kitchen

These are checks, optional AI watchers over the same footage, each priced in the Store from your own usage. Point one at a single camera, or run it across a whole folder in one action. The ones food businesses turn on first:

• Kitchen Hygiene watches prep stations the way a franchise audit would: staff handling food without gloves or hair covering, food left uncovered outside active use, visibly dirty surfaces. It flags the lapse when it happens, not in a report three weeks later.
• Pest Watch reads the overnight footage for rodents, birds indoors and visible insect activity, including the small fast blur near the floor that a person scrubbing footage would miss. If something moves through the kitchen at night, you hear about it before the EHO does.
• Fire & Smoke Watch flags visible smoke, flames or a fire-like glow, and it's told to ignore steam from normal cooking equipment. In a room full of heat and oil, that's the check earning its keep at 4am.
• Cleaning / Service Verification is a report check: it reads the timeline from a camera and gives a verdict, with timestamps, on whether the close-down clean actually happened. The rota says yes; the report says whether the camera agrees.
• Daily Summary is a report too: one plain-English email at close of day covering what happened across the cameras it reads, written for an owner who wasn't standing in the kitchen.

The price is the same arithmetic for a takeaway or a twelve-site franchise: based on your own usage for your cameras and hours, never less than $9 a month, with the full derivation on screen at signup before you pay. Frames where nothing moved cost nothing, which suits kitchens: the closed overnight hours are cheap to watch precisely because they're mostly empty, and the frames that do get analysed are the ones with something moving through them. Each further check is priced in the Store from your own usage, and the report checks start at a $3 monthly floor.

Overnight evidence before the EHO visit

Inspections and pest control both run on evidence, and the strongest evidence is footage with a timestamp. Pest Watch turns the cameras you already have into an overnight log: when activity was flagged, where, and what the frame shows, so the conversation with your pest contractor starts from what actually happened. None of this makes you compliant on its own. It makes sure the first person to know is you. And when a question arrives after the fact (what time the delivery turned up, who propped the fire door), the footage is searchable in plain English, with answers in seconds rather than an evening of scrubbing.

Franchises get the same thing at estate scale. In the Library, each site gets a folder, the search bar reads whichever folder you're standing in (subfolders included), and a check runs across a whole folder in one action, so Kitchen Hygiene can cover every kitchen in the group without anyone configuring cameras one by one. Alerts from every site land in one filterable tab, on screen, by email or as a JSON webhook, and one event fires one alert; a check re-firing within two minutes is logged as the same event continuing.

Getting started

Create an account at app.svid.ai and answer four questions: business type, what to watch for, camera count, hours a day. Onboarding suggests a check bundle and a watch level (both editable) and shows the price with its arithmetic across all three watch levels before Stripe takes a card. Then point Svid at the RTSP feeds from your existing recorder, or upload last week's exports if you'd rather see what it finds in footage you already have. Nothing in the kitchen changes.

Can it give us evidence before an environmental health inspection?

It gives you what an inspection would find, earlier. Kitchen Hygiene flags lapses at the prep stations as they happen, and Pest Watch reads the overnight footage and flags activity with timestamps. Neither makes you compliant by itself; both mean the findings reach you first, while there's still time to fix them.

Won't cooking steam set off Fire & Smoke Watch all day?

The check is specifically told to ignore steam from normal cooking equipment and to look for smoke, flames or a fire-like glow. It also judges a window of recent frames rather than a single snapshot, so one hazy frame doesn't fire an alert, and a re-fire within two minutes is logged as the same event continuing rather than a new one.

Do we need new cameras in the kitchen?

No. Svid reads the RTSP feeds your recorder already produces, uploaded files, or video URLs. If a camera can see the prep station, that's enough; there's no proprietary hardware.

What does it cost for a single restaurant?

Based on your own usage for your cameras and hours, with a $9 a month minimum, worked out from four questions at signup and shown with its full derivation before you pay. Motion gating means the closed overnight hours cost very little, and the report checks start at a $3 monthly floor.

We're a franchise. Can head office see every kitchen?

Yes. Each site gets a folder in the Library, checks run across whole folders in one action, and every site's alerts land in one filterable tab. Search reads whichever folder you're in, subfolders included, so one query can cover the whole group.