Safetray
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| Inventor | Alison Grieve |
|---|---|
| Inception | 2009 |
| Manufacturer | Safetray Products Ltd |
| Available | Available |
| Current supplier | safetrayproducts.com |
| Website | Official website |
Safetray is a brand name for a retractable finger receiver incorporated into the underside of a round wait staff tray to assist in handling the tray when carrying food and drinks for service in the hospitality industry. The handclip design provides leverage, helping to prevent toppling. The Safetray, invented in 2009, is now sold worldwide by Edinburgh-based Safetray Products Ltd.
Wait staff trays are typically large circular disks used to serve drinks and/or food to people in restaurants, bars, and other hospitality industry businesses. The waiter or waitress carries the tray with the open palm of one hand placed underneath, in about the center of the tray, relying on dry friction between the hand and the smooth metal or plastic undersurface of the tray to retain control of the tray. Occasionally, the tray may slide from the waitperson's hand, and the contents crash to the floor. In a May 2012 survey of food industry servers, those responding revealed nearly 25 percent of staff that work or have worked in the hospitality industry have suffered an injury as a result of a toppled serving tray. Of those people questioned, 23 percent had burned or cut themselves while trying to serve drinks or food from a serving tray.
Different devices have been developed in an effort to assist waitstaff in stabilising the service trays. Inventors have tried techniques such as attaching finger knobs/hubs (1998) and removable hand posts (2010) that protrude from the underside of the tray. They also tried the use of finger insertion holes in the tray to stabilize the tray. To restrain the hand to the underside of the tray, inventors have looked into devices such as a hand panel allowing insertion of two fingers of a hand (1985), a separately-fingered digit forward-retention device (1999), and a stretchable strap that forms a loop into which the user's fingers are inserted (2003).
In December 2009 Alison Grieve, a 32-year-old waitress and event manager from Bruntsfield,Edinburgh, witnessed a waitress drop a tray full of glasses of champagne at a corporate event for a delegation of international lawyers. To address how a tray could right itself at the moment of impending tilt, Grieve, a first-time inventor with a university background in 'History of film and photography', developed a finger receiver attached to the bottom of a wait tray based on first-principle physics, load dispersal, and counter movement. In a closed position, the finger receiver lays flush with the bottom of the wait tray so that the tray can sit on the surface of a bar or table without wobbling and can be stacked onto other trays. When the device is open, two slots can be accessed into which a waitperson may secure their two inside fingers, similar to how a flip-flop structurally attaches itself between the toes of the foot to counter the large stresses place upon it. The Safetray product's arrangement creates a strong cantilever advantage for the waitperson to allow them additional control over torque caused by items placed in various locations around the tray. The stability achieved with the Safetray product allows a waitperson to place a bottle of wine right at the edge of the tray while still keeping the tray in a horizontal position by reacting instinctively against the bottle's off-balance downward force.
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Wikipedia