In this article we will talk about 3 reasons why you need kitchen automation for your business.
1. Quality and Consistency of Products
Kitchen automation can help to increase the quality and consistency of a restaurant’s product offerings. The fact is we humans are well, only human. We are great at many activities, however doing things exactly the same way repeatedly isn’t something we are particularly good at or even enjoy.
Take for example walking into any fast casual restaurant and hearing the alarm from a piece of kitchen equipment. That is usually the sound of a food item being over cooked or held for too long. There are many reasons this can happen. Often, kitchen employees have too many tasks to accomplish all at once. They get to the griddle a few seconds – or even minutes later than the recipe calls for. Now the product is overcooked and out of spec. A related situation might be that instructions tell the cook to grill 10 pieces in a batch. To keep up with demand, the cook seeing open space places 15 pieces. The product comes off with less flavor and more water since the recovery of the grill cannot keep up with the additional load. Kitchen automation can solve these problems.
Staying with the griddle example, imagine the cook station of the future. An automated refrigerator or freezer, cook top, and post-cook holding all tied together. A “robotic” cooking station can load the precise number of pieces to the cook top and cook them for the exact number of seconds. If the cook top temperature drops, it can increase power or cook time. Either way, once the system is dialed in, it will produce exactly the same product over and over again. This means delivering the quality and flavor your customers expect in a reasonable amount of time.
2. Increased Throughput
Kitchen automation can squeeze more throughput out of existing kitchen equipment. Kitchen equipment such as cooktops and fryers come with data stating how much product they can cook in a given time period. We find that these numbers are almost never achieved in practice. This is because in order to hit the maximum throughput, an employee needs to be standing by, ready to remove product and reload in precise quantities at exactly the right time. And, did we mention instantaneously too?
Once product is on a piece of cooking equipment, a few minutes go by where the cook can attend to other tasks. Unless the operation is running a truly lean restaurant where every operation takes the same amount of time, it is likely that they will return to the cook station only when they hear an alarm. When you add up all of those missed seconds over the course of a day, it accounts for meaningful loss in throughput.
Earlier we discussed the results of an overloaded cook station. This is often a tactic to “catch up” with demand. Ultimately, the station will likely be under powered for the additional load, take longer to finish the cook, and deliver lower quality products.
The fully automated kitchen station eliminates these inefficiencies, squeaking out capacity that already exists in your restaurant. The equipment is always ready at exactly the correct time to remove finished product and add new.
This not only reduces cook station downtime, but it can eliminate some of the most stressful jobs in the kitchen.
3. Elimination of Redundant, Unpleasant, or Unsafe Jobs
We do not believe that the purpose of kitchen automation is to eliminate jobs. Kitchen automation can allow businesses to shift their employees into positions that truly require a human’s touch. These jobs are more fulfilling for both the employee and the customer.
The best tasks for kitchen automation are the most repetitive ones. Tedious tasks, such as operating deep fryers are perfect candidates. The operations are the same all day long. The work is physically strenuous, seemingly never ending, and messy. Finding good reliable employees who want to show up every day for this job and do it well can be challenging. Leaving these types of tasks to machines may allow for happier employees with greater moral.
Imagine if that employee was freed up to greet customers? Could they help keep your register queues orderly, and moving faster? Might they be available to help a customer find the bathroom? How might they be able to create a better overall experience for the customer?
The removal of unpleasant, strenuous tasks through kitchen automation will lead to happier employees. In the end, businesses who use kitchen automation will see better employee retention, better service to your customers, and ultimately repeat business.
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