Kitchen Operations 101

Operations in your kitchen are key to minimizing costs, labor, and prep time. We recommend paying special attention to the following: 

• Kitchen Layout
• Ingredient Prep 
• Training Staff
• Staffed Hours
• Menu Items

Overall, always try to find wasteful processes and eliminate them continuously. As your sales grow, you may need to revamp your operations to be able to handle the additional volume as well. 

Kitchen Layout

How you organize your kitchen will greatly affect how quickly you can make food in your kitchen. 

• General flow - Your cook line should start from the back of the kitchen to the front and out the door. Try to remove repetitive motion and reduce the staff moving back and forth
• Capacity Restraints - Understand how long it takes for certain food items to cook in your kitchen. For example, how long does it take to fry the chicken tenders and how many can you make with one fryer?
• Packing Station - Be sure to have a dedicated packing station near the door with an expo staff member. This is very important for smooth operators and order accuracy. We recommend having an SOP/instructions taped near the door to check that the order is correct

Ingredient Prep 

Prepping is a key technique you can utilize to improve your prep time and get food out of your kitchen quickly.  

• When to Prep 
  • • Do as much prep as possible. For example, if something has a shelf life of 3 days, do all 3 days of prep at once
    • Don't prep during peak hours. Instead, focus on the lull between lunch and dinner to not have to staff extra hours for prepping. 
    • Have a standard prep list for shifts (how much of every item is needed)
    • Understand how long it takes frozen proteins to thaw so you can prepare accordingly 
• How to Optimize Prep Time
  
  • • Investigate buying pre-prepped foods from food vendors (diced onions, shredded lettuce, etc). 
    • Consider buying smallware to speed up prep (tomato dicer, robot coupe)
•  Prepped Food Storage
  • • Health Code - Health Department requires that you store and label prepped materials with dates that the items were prepped. Be sure to utilize the oldest prepped items first
    • Cold Storage inside your kitchen - You need some type of cold storage in your kitchen to store prepped materials for at least a day of sales so you don't have to go to your shared storage space in the middle of the day
    • Demand - What your item demand so you know how much you need to purchase 

Training Staff

• Front load your efforts in training staff so you can start stepping away 
• Be super hands on at the beginning to make sure everything is working the way it should be
• In Your Kitchen
  • • Create a specific timeline and checklist for closing and opening shifts
    • Display your recipes in the kitchen 
• Train your team on the details of the Otter tablet so they feel empowered to use its features

Staffed Hours

• Most operators have staff come 30 minutes before the shift opens and stay 30 minutes after
• We don't recommend closing in the middle of the day for 1-2 hours, instead use that time to prep food and continue to handle the few orders that come in 
• Number of people in the kitchen depends on type of food you make! Some people can do it with 1, some do it with more. We recommend adding a person for every 40-50 orders per day increase
  • • Note: Look at order volume by the hour to understand when you may need to staff more

Menu Items

• Do you have certain items that take a really long time to make? If these items don't sell really well, consider eliminating them from your menu
• Do you have certain items that don't sell very well but you are buying ingredients for them? Consider eliminating those items and saving on spending for vendors