The Fundamentals of Improving Foodservice Speed

HOW DO YOU SPEED UP YOUR KITCHEN OPERATIONS WITHOUT SACRIFICING QUALITY?

And how do you offer all-day food options without the need for highly paid staff working in the kitchen during lower demand periods?

MENU

A fast, efficient kitchen that provides quality dishes is only as good as its menu. There is a fine balance between a menu that offers a range of options that will appeal to patrons, and keep them coming back, and a menu that is unmanageable for kitchen staff.

The best menus are often developed by trial and error, ensuring that owners and managers are working with chefs to find the sweet spot.

PREP WORK

Critical to this is the ability to pre-prepare and to use the same ingredients across more than one dish.

If your prep work is continually missing your targets, look at both the people and the processes involved.

WORKFLOW

Workflow is another obvious area. You can achieve speed at scale with a better designed layout, where all parts of the operation are working seamlessly. This can be costly and disruptive – but it’s a great investment during any renovation project. efficient. If you don’t have the knowledge, your kitchen suppliers will be able to help. Kitchen equipment companies are often happy to provide a consultancy service, and your food suppliers often have former chefs on staff who can look at your layout with you.

Another source of wisdom is veteran publicans (another benefit of having ‘friends in business’ via membership of the AHA|SA). Where they aren’t your direct competitor, members are normally very happy to offer advice.

The efficiency of taking the order through to delivery at the table is another important piece in the jigsaw puzzle of achieving peak throughput.

PROCESS IMPROVEMENT

Experienced hoteliers will want to look at your systems. You must have standard operating procedures in place – and staff using them.

Processes aren’t worth the paper they are written on if they aren’t being used by staff. This is where staff selection and training are important – as well as monitoring and measurement by management.

The best processes rely on operational discipline. This means doing the right thing, the same way, to the desired level of quality, every time.

EQUIPMENT

How efficient is your kitchen equipment?

Having great equipment can make up for a multitude of problems, especially in these times when staffing and skills shortages are hot issues for most hotels.

A trained eye in the kitchen will also be able to determine if one piece of equipment is overworked and acting as a bottleneck.

To increase speed, always consider your capacity to right-size your equipment, replacing old over-sized units for smaller equipment. This can help you to free up work and movement space, or to install an extra oven etc. that can radically improve your operations.

Combination ovens are godsend, both for professional kitchen staff and also for bar staff that might need to quickly prepare a snack item for a patron. The latter are able to take advantage of programmable settings to achieve consistent quality, at speed.

Don’t get tunnel vision when it comes to updating your kitchen equipment. Look at everything!

How effective is your dishwasher? Is there a better combi oven on the market? Can you achieve greater speed with pizza equipment? What is the capacity and turnaround times for deep fryers?

An accomplished foodservice professional will also be watching for ways to reduce operating costs, using modern technology to be able to achieve a range of benefits (not just speed).

An example of this is kitchen appliances that provide data on their usage, ranging from oven usage through to the energy and water required to run your dishwasher.

For groups with multiple sites, it is possible for a busy manager to do this at anytime, from anywhere, using mobile apps.