A grease fire does not end when the fire is out.
It ends after the closure, the rebuild, the months of lost revenue, and the day someone asks you to produce the cleaning records. That is the moment your file either holds or it doesn’t.
7,410
Structure fires a year in eating and drinking establishments
$165M
Direct property damage, every year
22%
Of those fires trace to a lapse in cleaning
Source: National Fire Protection Association
The records exist. They are just in six different places.
Your hood cleaner leaves an invoice. Your suppression company leaves a tag on the wall. The sprinkler report went to whoever was on shift. The extinguisher tech signed something. Your health permit is in a frame and the temperature logs are in a binder in the back.
Every one of those is evidence. None of them are together, none of them are dated where you can find them, and none of them show you what comes due next.
A binder shows you tried. EvidLY is evidence.
I am retained as an NFPA 96 expert witness in commercial kitchen fire litigation. My work is reading kitchen records after a fire and saying what they prove. EvidLY is built from what I have watched those records fail to prove.
— Arthur Haggerty, IKECA CECS
Fire is the one that makes the news. It is not the only one.
Food
One outbreak can cost more than a year of profit.
Johns Hopkins modeled the cost of a single foodborne illness outbreak at a restaurant. A small one, five people sick, no lawsuits: about $4,000. A 250-person outbreak at a casual dining restaurant with lawsuits, legal fees and fines: $2.2 million. At fine dining, $2.6 million.
Their range works out to as much as 101% of a restaurant’s annual profit. From one outbreak.
Your defense is the same thing that defends you in a fire: a dated record of what you did. Cooling logs. Handler cards. The pest service you can prove happened. EvidLY keeps them, and identifies the ones about to lapse.
Source: Bartsch et al., Public Health Reports, 2018 · Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
Insurance
Your policy may already require the records you don’t keep.
Many restaurant property policies carry a protective safeguards endorsement. It is one page and it is a condition of the insurance, not a suggestion: you agree to maintain the listed systems — suppression, sprinklers, alarms, the exhaust cleaning contract — in working order.
In a California case, Y2K Textile v. Lexington Insurance, the appeals court held the insurer properly denied a fire loss because the endorsement required a contract with a duct cleaning service and the insured could not produce one. Missed semi-annual hood service is one of the more common denial triggers on these files.
EvidLY reads the policies you upload and identifies the operational provisions inside them — what your carrier requires of you, matched against what is actually in your record. Your agent evaluates the coverage. EvidLY never makes coverage determinations.
Source: ISO protective safeguards endorsement · Y2K Textile, Inc. v. Lexington Insurance Co. (Cal. Ct. App. 2006)
Property management
Your tenant’s kitchen is on your policy too.
The same endorsement reaches the building owner. In one reported matter, an owner’s carrier denied a fire loss in full over safeguards inside a long-leased restaurant space — a space the owner had no keys to and had not entered in years. The carrier’s position was that the condition is absolute: it applies whether or not you knew, whether or not you had access.
Every contractor working in your buildings is the same exposure in miniature. Expired general liability. Lapsed workers comp. A license that came current three months after the work was done.
EvidLY requests, collects and dates every vendor’s insurance, licenses and service records across every property you hold — so what is in your buildings is something you can produce, not something you assume.
Source: Protective safeguards case commentary, Biller Law Group
What you get before you decide anything
The Risk Assessment is free and takes three minutes. Everything after it is what a pilot includes.
The three-minute Risk Assessment
Ten questions on one kitchen. Which of your records you could send right now, which you’d have to find, and which aren’t on file — fire and food separately. No account, no contact details. Yours whether you sign or not.
We contact your vendors and collect their records
Suppression, sprinkler, alarm, extinguisher, pest, grease trap. We ask three times over two weeks and log every request with the date. You get the log.
Your account built to your counties, by hand
Every county writes its own requirements. Yours are configured before you log in, not left for you to figure out. Setup normally runs $199 for the group plus $99 a kitchen. Not in this phase.
Fifteen days of setup and training
Your people, trained on your account with your records already in it. Not charged.
Ninety days across three to five kitchens
Fire Safety and Food Safety, every record sealed and timestamped, every renewal identified before it lapses.
Nothing is charged until day 16.
$0 to start
$0 for the Risk Assessment · $0 for setup
Thirty days to change your mind.
If the pilot isn’t what you expected, tell us inside the first 30 days and we refund what you’ve paid. Not a credit, not a discount on the next term. We are asking an institution to trust a company it has not worked with before, so we carry that risk, not you.
We can only take on so many kitchens at once.
Every account is built by hand. We identify your vendors, chase their records, configure your counties, and train your people before you ever log in. That work does not scale by adding servers.
So pilots start in the order they are signed. That is not a sales tactic — it is the honest limit of doing it this way.
What the first months look like
Nothing is charged until your account is live and your records are in it.
Day 0
You sign
Authorization to contact your vendors, and a card on file. Nothing is charged.
Before day 1
We reach your vendors
You tell us who services each kitchen. We request and follow up — three times over two weeks. This takes as long as it takes and costs you nothing.
Days 1–15
We build your account
Your kitchens, your counties, your requirements, your people. Configured and trained, not handed to you empty.
Day 16
You go live
Your account opens and billing begins. The records are already collected, not promised.
Day 46
Refund window closes
Up to here, if it isn’t what you expected, we refund what you have paid.
Day 105
You decide
Extend to your remaining kitchens, or stop. Your records stay sealed and retrievable either way.
The onboarding clock
Your 15 days don’t start until we have everything.
If your suppression company takes five weeks to send a certificate, that’s our problem, not your onboarding window. The 15 days begin the day your records are in, however long that takes.
Pricing
| Kitchens | Per month | |
|---|---|---|
| Pilot, restaurants and chains90 days, then you decide | 3 to 5, named at signing | $199 first · $99 each additional |
| Pilot, institutionshospitals, senior care, districts, campuses | 3 to 5, named at signing | $399 first · $199 each additional |
| Single kitchenno term | 1 | $199 |
| Enterpriserate locked 24 months | 10 or more | Per conversation |
A pilot at a group with fewer than 10 kitchens extends to all of them at the same per-kitchen rate. A pilot at a group with 10 or more extends to Enterprise, rate locked 24 months. Setup — normally $199 plus $99 a kitchen for restaurants, $500 plus $200 a kitchen for institutions — is waived this phase.
Questions we get
Is there a free trial?
No, and here is the honest reason. Every account is built by a person, so a free month means we work for free — and an account with no records in it shows you nothing worth judging. The free Risk Assessment is the trial. The refund is the safety net.
Can we sign up online?
No. Accounts are not self-serve. We identify your vendors, collect your records, and configure your counties before you log in.
What if a vendor never answers?
We ask three times over two weeks and log every request with the date. Then we mark them unresponsive and move on — and you get the log, which is a useful thing to put in front of that vendor.
Why only three to five kitchens?
Because a pilot you can judge beats one you have to wait out. Five is enough to see what we do and small enough to start next week.
What happens to our records if we stop?
They stay sealed and retrievable and your account becomes read-only. We do not delete your evidence.
We are a Cleaning Pros Plus customer.
Then your hood cleaning certificates are already filed here, at no charge, for as long as we clean your kitchens. Talk to us about what else you want covered.
Start with the Risk Assessment. It costs nothing.
Three minutes on one kitchen, then thirty minutes with EvidLY if your answers show gaps worth closing.