Commercial Kitchens of the Future: Take 2!

When trying to conceptualize any kitchen of the future effort, a specific sense of purpose should drive our efforts. These goals should look to drive operational improvement for most any foodservice environment. This includes addressing:

• Customer service and speed with the intent of increasing sales
• Product quality and consistency with the intent of improving the food quality
• Labor efficiency with the goal of reducing cost and maintaining or increasing sales
• Improving the facility’s impact on the environment or its “The Green Effect”
• Facility size with the intent of lowering capital and operating cost

Without setting goals or aspiring to achieve something specific, the effort could end up generating lots of movement that lacks real progress. An initiative without goals or aspirations becomes just another project to talk about, but with no real results to show for your efforts.

In addition to knowing what you hope to achieve by creating a kitchen for the future, it may also be helpful to understand how the area under consideration has evolved over the years and what would be the perfect operating environment moving forward. For example, when tracing the operation of frying, the evolution could be depicted as follows: 

• Hot oil vat may have led to cooking timers…
• Timers may have led to time/temperature compensating computers…
• Somewhere along the way someone thought of basket lift arms…
• As well as decentralized equipment monitoring…
• Then a bit of automation with automated basket loader…
• Even more encompassing fully automated fryer efforts were done along the way…
•  And most recently, significant effort with energy efficient or “green” fryers….

With the exception of a fully automated fryer, the remaining aspects of a frying operation described above have been automated and were most likely part of a manufacturer’s effort to evolve the frying function in a foodservice operation. Those functions that were not automated remained the same likely due to an inability to achieve a positive return-on-investment. While frying has evolved considerably over the years, it is interesting to note that many multi-unit foodservice operators remain in the first phase of frying; using hot oil vats to cook, without timers or cooking computers.

A critical aspect of any kitchen of the future effort is to specifically and objectively quantify the financial impact involved, including the cost of development (R&D) and implementation to the end user, as well as the return the concept can expect on its investment. Along the way, those involved should perform an objective analysis of the effort, outlining clear milestones that can help guide the team when deciding whether to proceed with the initiative.
When looking at reducing labor costs, which can represent 25 percent to 35 percent of a facility’s total cost of sales, most foodservice operators tend to focus on developing equipment or technology that can execute the actual tasks performed by frontline personnel or, in some cases, management. 

While evaluating the impact of automating these steps, it is important to determine if the device or design only reduces the work content of an activity performed by a staff member, or if it actually allows the operator to reduce headcount. Reducing the peak business hour labor requirements (headcount) is critically important to foodservice operators, who often run understaffed during these times since they cannot afford to have the additional crew during the slower times or shoulders of the peak.

Other aspects to consider are the availability of the supporting technology, the implementation cost and the ability to integrate into existing locations, to name but a few.

A major consideration for any kitchen of the future is to ensure that the new design allows the foodservice operation the flexibility necessary to continue to evolve with the needs of its customers. This is of particular important in the areas of menu innovation and growth.  Concerns for not having enough flexibility, may curtail the new futuristic development.

Often the biggest quandary in undertaking any kitchen of the future effort is deciding who will take the first step: the operators or the supplier base?  It takes investment from someone.

Except for the AMF sponsored kitchen, which I mentioned in my previous post, there really has not been any major commercialized effort to significantly automate kitchen function during the past two decades.  This stalemate is likely driven from the concern of not being able to derive an ROI from the effort.  In the meantime, the issues that drive the need to develop a kitchen of the future, such as reducing labor costs, as well as food and development costs, all continue to exist and in some respects get more acute.  Something has got to give.  Will it be the operators, like we did at Burger King in the early 90’s, but abandoned, and other brands may be currently doing, or will it be lead and driven by the supplier base?  

Although mainstream automation efforts may not happen soon, in the meantime, incremental futuristic innovation will continue to flourish for specific pieces of technology and equipment, driven by the suppliers and operators that realize that such evolution is critical to fuel growth.