Are You Making One of These 3 Critical Commercial Kitchen Mistakes?

Being the owner of a food service business requires many skills. In addition to running day-to-day operations, you also need to plan and design your establishment to handle food storage, preparation, and service. It's easy to make small mistakes, whether you're an inexperienced owner or you're launching your first restaurant.

Unfortunately, problems with commercial kitchen design can impact employee efficiency and satisfaction, and can ultimately create unhappy customers. Recognizing and resolving these issues is a critical skill for any business owner.

Below, you'll find three common mistakes with commercial kitchen management that can critically affect your business.

1. Short-Term vs. Long-Term Thinking

No one likes to spend money unnecessarily, whether it's on personal items or business investments. However, short-term thinking in a business context can often have more profound long-term effects. One area where this can be especially troublesome is when it comes to equipment maintenance, repairs, and upgrades.

If you have aging equipment in your kitchen, you might think that the most cost-effective option is to squeeze as much life out of it as possible. After all, why should you fix or replace parts of your kitchen that still work? Taking this approach will save you money right now, but it can have devastating long-term consequences.

Aging or poorly maintained kitchen equipment slows your employees down, affects their workflow, and may even impact the quality of the food they produce. You'll also pay more in utility bills for aging or failing equipment, slowly draining the money you save by avoiding repairs. A proactive approach to maintenance and upgrades will cost a little more now but save you money over the long term.

2. Ignoring Your Unique Business Requirements

Commercial kitchen design isn't a one-size-fits-all endeavor. Are you catering for hundreds of guests or serving food for a tiny hole-in-the-wall restaurant with a handful of booths? Do you provide your guests with a full-course fine dining experience, or are you focused on rapidly delivering takeout orders to delivery drivers and pick-up customers?

Your kitchen needs to reflect your most common use cases, even if your staff occasionally needs to improvise or switch up their workflow. When designing your workflow, you'll need to pay special attention to how your cooks deliver food. Kitchen designs can vary considerably for restaurants that prepare plates one at a time versus serving only when the entire table's order is ready.

These requirements can significantly impact the appliances you choose for your kitchen. If you serve appetizer-style items on your menu, you may need more space for cold preparation. Likewise, you'll need to ensure hot preparation equipment such as stoves can handle your expected volume of line preparation. Focusing on your specific kitchen needs can significantly improve your workflow.

3. Not Thinking About Clean-Up

There's no getting around it: commercial kitchens generate a lot of waste. Cooking for a large number of guests uses plenty of water, and you'll also have food scraps to deal with both post-preparation as well as after your guests complete a meal. These aren't the most exciting topics to think about, but they can have an outsized impact on how well your kitchen functions.

Don't immediately blame your employees if you notice your kitchen staff struggling to keep their workstations clean. Instead, there may be an issue with how you deal with waste in your kitchen. Workers should never need to choose between completing orders efficiently and staying hygienic. If this is happening in your kitchen, you may need to consider better options for dealing with waste products.

Common mistakes in this area include not having enough wash stations or using trash bins that are too small, too far apart, or too separated from the regular prep workflow. Observing your staff as they work can help you spot these problems and determine if you can resolve them by adding new equipment or rearranging your existing kitchen appliances.

Whether you're designing your first kitchen or looking for ways to improve an existing one, Hawkins Commercial Appliance Service Inc. can help. Give us a call to discuss how maintaining or upgrading your kitchen equipment can help

your business.