Article
Hi-tech kitchens cut costs
Three technology solutions to save money, time.
June 9, 2008
What a difference a year makes. A year ago, the top challenge for restaurant operators who participated in the National Restaurant Association (NRA) monthly survey was employee recruitment and retention.
Last month? The economy was the top concern for 27 percent of respondents, a record high, said Hudson Riehle, senior vice president of research for the NRA. The second highest challenge: food prices, at 21 percent.
Many operational costs are rising in the restaurant industry, including wholesale food costs, which are running at an inflation rate of 7.9 percent, Riehle said. To compensate, "restaurant operators have to undertake a host of additional activities."
Those activities include solutions such as menu re-engineering, staff development and turning to technology solutions, including the addition of kiosk-ordering systems in the front of the store, he said.
Restaurant operators are finding technology solutions are saving time, money and labor, whether they using automated appliances or interfacing new technology with existing point-of-sale systems.
Automated appliances cut waste
For Rick Ivey, founder and chief executive officer of Fredericksburg, Va.-based Virginia Barbeque, reducing food and labor costs always has been an important factor in his fast-food barbecue franchise. Typically, two employees run each store, serving about 200-250 customers a day.
When Virginia Barbeque first opened in 2000, fried food was not on the menu because, Ivey said, the company "didn't want to have the expense of hoods" or fire suppression.
When the company franchised in 2004, it utilized the Autofry, an automated, enclosed deep fryer manufactured by Northborough, Mass.-based Motion Technology Inc. (MTI). The fryer's small footprint – allowing it to sit on a 3-foot-square table – and hoodless design meant there was no build-out expense.
Even better is its efficiency, allowing as little as one order of fries to be cooked at a time, so a full batch isn't wasted. The stores typically sell about 50 orders of fries a day, Ivey said.
The fryer's automation technology allows the 11-unit franchise to maintain its low labor overhead, with only one prep employee per store. That employee drops a batch into the machine, pushes a button, and the Autofry does the rest, from timing to dumping the order in the holding bin.
Virginia Barbeque uses the Autofry model with two oil wells, allowing for the separate frying of items such as hush puppies, onion rings and chicken tenders. Having those fried items on the menu has increased sales, Ivey said.
Interfaced kitchen systems
Ben Koether, founder and CEO of SCK Direct Inc., based in Hartford, Conn., has recently launched a system that integrates a restaurant's POS system with its appliances to streamline operations and reduce food waste.
Koether developed Smart Commercial Kitchen (SCK) after 40 years in the restaurant industry as a solution to the chaotic nature of restaurant kitchens.
The system can reduce food and energy costs by identifying the proper time to turn on appliances and increase food production. Too often, Koether said, employees open the store out of habit, turning everything on, whether or not an appliance is needed at that time, and immediately dropping full batches of food even though sales have yet to pick up.
The SCK works by prompting the kitchen staff by way of screens that use colors, pictures and numbers to identify the actions required. The system has a real-time database that, depending on the additional modules, can coordinate a kitchen to notify employees about how many batches of food to prepare as well as when to toss expired food items.
"It's kind of like an electronic band director," Koether said. "We have an electronic restaurant manager who's speaking to everyone in the store simultaneously with no noise. It's wonderful."
Koether said the system saves labor and food costs while it improves the work atmosphere. The system is easy to learn, cutting training time of new employees by 60 percent, Koether said. Product freshness is improved 79 percent, he said.
While the atmosphere in a Smart Kitchen improves immediately, the initial set up of the system takes three to six months to ensure the complete interface. Subsequent installations in other locations are more immediate. Koether said he expects the set-up time to be reduced as SCK works to interface with all existing POS systems.
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The system also requires a monthly maintenance subscription, which includes monitoring of the system. The hardware costs $2,500-$5,000, and the service fee runs $5-$10 a day, Koether said.
But adding technology solutions for the sake of adding the latest thing is not the answer, said Karen Sammon, president of software solutions for ParTech Inc., a New Hartford, N.Y.-based hardware and software provider for the hospitality industry with a concentration in foodservice.
Instead, operators need to find applications and solutions that are simple to use while they reduce labor and food costs – and utilize auxiliary benefits from existing systems.
For example, food-safety systems can implement automated task lists to maintain fresh foods in a controlled environment. A side benefit then is to use that information to control food waste, thus reducing unnecessary food costs.
Track waste to cut costs
Andrew Shakman, president and CEO of Portland, Ore.-based LeanPath Inc., agrees that technology itself is not the sole solution. Communication and training of the staff are key, particularly in the area of food costs.
The primary factor to tracking food waste is communicating the monetary value of the food wasted, he said. "People get numb to this stuff. They forget this food has value."
LeanPath offers waste-management solutions for the foodservice and hospitality industries. Its systems interface with a kitchen's POS system and include a scale and screen set up at a kitchen's trash bins to record all food waste.
While a system such as LeanPath's can expedite tracking of waste, operators on a limited budget can do paper tracking, such as keeping log books, Shakman said. What's needed more than technology, he said, is turning back to standard best practices.
"We had a lot of these best practices," he said. "We just got so busy . . . some of these practices just got lost."
