How to improve your restaurant's kitchen productivity?

In the F&B industry, kitchen management and productivity play an important part in your outlet’s success. Being able to increase your kitchen productivity will not only improve food quality and serving speed and in turn, improve customer satisfaction, and bring in more revenue.

Here is how you can give your kitchen productivity a boost.

Employee Manual/SOP

Creating an employee manual or SOP may seem like a tedious and redundant task, but you will reap the benefits of kitchen productivity in the long run. An employee manual helps your staff better understand their roles and responsibilities, and the necessary steps or best practices in food preparation. 

This also helps your new kitchen staff familiarize themselves with their duties faster, shortening their learning curve so they can contribute to your kitchen productivity.

Inventory Management(POS)

Setting up an inventory management system is important to avoid running out of stock during peak hours. 

POS systems nowadays have inventory management systems that include recipe management. This feature allows you to set a close estimate of the quantity of ingredients consumed for each dish. 

When ingredient stocks are running low, your POS system will display a low stock warning when dishes using ingredients with low stock levels are ordered. Your POS system will also generate a low stock report of all ingredients which require a restock so that you never run out of ingredients for your best sellers, safeguarding your revenue.

Split the kitchen into sections for different cooking styles

This is a common practice in many F&B businesses, and especially important if your restaurant or cafe offers a wide variety of food. Breaking the kitchen into smaller sections based on different cooking styles will help your kitchen staff focus better on their roles and will, in turn, increase their productivity. 

Order Organisation(KDS & Kitchen Docket Printing setting)

Ordering and food preparation works hand in hand. A good POS system helps link front of house(ordering) and back of house (food preparation in kitchen) seamlessly.

We mentioned earlier that splitting up your kitchen into sections based on cooking styles to boost kitchen productivity. In order to maximize productivity in your kitchen, your POS system should be able to split up an order, and send kitchen dockets to its respective kitchen section. This way, you reduce confusion between different kitchen sections and help your staff focus on the preparation of their respective dishes.

Apart from using kitchen dockets to send orders to their specific kitchen sections, Kitchen Display Solutions(KDS) are a great way to improve your order organisation. These are tablet based solutions which can be placed in each kitchen section to reflect section specific orders. The KDS allows your kitchen staff to strike off orders which have been prepared and focus on those that are pending. 

By displaying orders digitally through the KDS, you also improve order preparation accuracy as kitchen dockets going missing will be a thing of the past.

Invest in productivity boosting kitchen equipment 

Kitchen equipment makes a difference in the efficiency of your kitchen. Be sure to invest on productivity boosting equipment on areas which you feel can be more efficient. For example, getting an automatic dishwasher to speed up the washing of kitchen equiptment so that they can be reused quickly, or getting a POS system which can seamlessly link your front of house operations to the back of house operations as mentioned in our previous points.

Getting a POS system to boost your kitchen productivity

If you are interested in getting a POS system which can help centralize inventory management and link up your ordering with the kitchen, drop us your contact details below and we will be happy to arrange a free demo for you!