I have a friend that owns a very popular breakfast and lunch restaurant in our small town. During the winter months it’s fairly slow and the service is fine, but during the summer tourist season there is usually a 30 minute wait for food once your order has been taken.
In talking with my friend he explained that during the summer months the kitchen gets overwhelmed with orders, and while all of the cooks struggle to keep up often for a particular order the pancakes will be ready but the eggs won’t, or vice verse. In other words, there is no coordination of the cooking process once the order gets into the POS system and it’s left up to the cooks to coordinate the cooking so that everything gets done in time for a particular order. He said that some cooks instinctively knew how to do this while others consistently do it poorly.
This built-in inefficiency leads to slow service as soon as they start to get busy, and also leads to unhappy customers.
As a software engineer I started thinking about the problem and came up with a number of algorithms I could use to help direct the cooks so that orders were prepared as efficiently as possible. But then I thought about it some more and realized this wasn’t a unique problem and that someone must have come with a systems for doing this already, but I haven’t been able to find anyone selling this kind of application.
If you are aware of a software application that is used to optimize short order cooking in small to medium size restaurants I would be interested in hearing about it.
I do not own a restaurant, but I was a start-up manager for a food-service chain for about 5 years.
My thoughts are
it will be difficult to find self-owned eateries that have enough cash flow to afford a specialized software app. Money is very tight in this business.
it will be hard to find cooks that are willing to use it. Good cooks will be insulted, poor cooks will ignore/be unable to work with the system. As an additional note, many cooks (not kitchen managers, but cooks) are not the most literate of folks, and so a software app would be of even more limited utility.
chains tend to use their own proprietary systems for this. Ours did, and in some ways it was helpful, but once the crew was acclimated to the work (and we got a good crew) I didn’t need to use it anymore. This will likely be the case for lots of smaller places you could market to, especially if they have a small (family) staff core.
All that in mind, perhaps you could consider a small re-brand and create/sell this as a ‘short-order-cook training module’, intended to be used only to orient and help prepare incoming cooks. That could be more useful, especially to owners who are not familiar with cooking/food-service.
Sounds like the job of a food expeditor. Traditionally, the job is done manually by the senior most person in the kitchen. As they’re also QAing each dish that goes out and comes back and serve as the interface between the servers and the cooks, it would be a hard job to automate.
It would presumably take the place of an expediter. In this case they have 4 or 5 cooks and can’t afford an expediter, hence they are looking to create (or buy) software that can do essentially the same thing (whether that is possible or not remains to be seen).
I have seen the system that large chains use but that’s a different problem. McDonald’s, for example, sells burgers (of one sort or another), fries, drinks and a few other things. The fry station makes fries pretty much all day and the burger guy just worries about making burgers that have been ordered as quickly as possible.
This isn’t about duplicating what a fast food chain does, this is more about directing each cook so they make specific things at certain times and the software manages everything to make sure it all gets done for a given order. It’s conceptually easy to do, but certainly some cooks will simply ignore the system and do it their way.
I like the short-order-cook training module idea, but I don’t think there would be enough value to justify what we would have to charge for the software and associated hardware.
As far as cash flow goes they have to solve the problem one way or another to stay competitive. Either they hire expensive experienced cooks, or an expediter or use some kind of software.
If you have cooks that refuse to use the system you can always let them go. You would only hire cooks that are amenable to this kind of automation since it should make their lives easier in the long run.
I don’t think this kind of problem goes away once everyone is trained since some experienced cooks are better at it than others, and always will be. They have been running their business for 3 years and the service isn’t getting any better during the summer months so they have to do something.
IMHO a computer program can track the hundreds of different things that have to happen in the right order in the kitchen during the day better than a bunch of humans can.
(Worked in restaurants all my working life, but never an owner!)
Your friends needs to hire a junior manager that’s a goer! Someone with both front and back of the house experience.
His job description should be; supervising staff, scheduling, closing/opening (times to suit owner). Someone who can expedite, work the fryer, run the dishwasher, bus tables, clean up messes and schmooze customers! All as required.
Creating such a position could enhance every employee’s output and general efficiency. And get him through those overwhelmingly busy times in the summer.
That’s your answer right there. You said it in the OP as well, some cooks can just do it, some can’t. You need to find the ones that can just ‘do it’ and pay them well enough to stick around. Also, he needs to find a chef to run the kitchen. I was going to say he should hit up a tech college, but those guys have dreams and aspirations and running a short order place ain’t one of them. Just someone with some managerial skills that knows how to cook and tell people what to do.
Chef’s are a tough bunch and in my line of work (a step back from restaurants) I won’t hire them and, to be honest (sorry, I know we have chefs on the board), they can be very difficult to deal with. That’s why I’m using the term loosely. The (actual) chef that just quit the steak house downtown because the owner’s a jerkface…don’t hire him. Hire the guy that’s been working at IHOP for the last two years. He’ll know how to cook and with some help and good staff he might be able to run the kitchen.
Also, make sure your friend has a set of heat lamps. I mean, you always know that your food came out at the wrong time when the plate is a thousand degrees, but at least it’s still warm.
The first problem you’ve got is that you are relying on the word of your friend to explain to you what the problem in the kitchen is. If the issue is indeed the issue he states it is: then fixing that is simply a matter of training the staff, expediting properly, and developing more efficient systems.
A “software” solution may work fine if things are produced the same every night (as in the McDonalds examples) but in a normal restaurant? Things aren’t cooked the same every night. Different burners will heat at different temperatures and will take different amounts of time to cook the same product. Menu items will run out and the Chef will have to substitute it on the fly. This is what the human element adds: they can make decisions. If something cooks faster than anticipated then that can be communicated and fixed in seconds with the other members of the kitchen team. If an ingredient has to be substituted, the chef knows that it will take five minutes longer to cook, so plans the rest of the cooking out appropriately. There really isn’t a practical way for software to step in here and it would only get in the way.
I think that the industry proves this assertion wrong. Very few restaurants have issues getting the eggs and the bacon cooked together on time. If they have been running the business for 3 years and the service isn’t getting any better: there is something wrong with this particular business, and not with the industry at large.
With the investment of millions of dollars you might be able to come up with a computer program that might do a semi-reasonable job under very precise circumstances. But you underestimate what the dynamics of a well run kitchen brigade is capable of. I suggest that if you seriously want to take this idea any further, you need to spend at least a week working in a real working kitchen. Coordination of the cooking process isn’t that difficult. Getting a good expediter is probably the first step. There are too many variables to make developing software an affordable option for most small businesses, and I doubt you could develop software that would be of any use on a small budget. There are already software solutions for controlling costs in the kitchen, solutions like ChefTechave been around for many years, they do a fantastic job but they aren’t used by a huge segment of the potential market because it takes a bit of work to understand, and it requires a huge amount of time to firstly set it up, then it takes time to maintain it.
Have a closer look at the ChefTec software screenshot I linked to. Look at the recipie. That recipe is simply a text field. To create the software to do what you want to do you would have to convert that text field into steps. Each step would have to have measures and time allocated to it. This would have to be manually entered by someone. You would have to standardise your measures to ensure the spaceprobe doesn’t crash on launch. Then you have to figure out how to deliver those instructions to each station in the kitchen. You need a way for each chef to be able to start one process and follow it through to completion without mixing it up with other processes. Now how much spare time do you think the head chef has to maintain a system like this? Your solution is not only going to cost the restaurant a lot of money in simple development, but it is also likely to cost more in staff-hours per week as well. People are not as fallible as you think.
Consider that many restaurants don’t even invest in a decent point-of-sales system, I don’t think what you are considering to be a practical solution for very many people. My suggestion would be for the restaurant in question to hire a restaurant consultant to come in and work through any issues the restaurant may have. (Assuming the restaurant actually has problems: are the “unhappy customers” based on actual data, or were you making an assumption?)
This is clearly just a management problem. Trying to use computers to solve it will make it worse. Since the overload is only for a couple of months out of the year it’s probably not worth the cost to expand the kitchen to handle greater capacity, but if he’s adding staff for the summer what he needs first is a good strong kitchen manager. If he’s got cooks who have been there a long time that won’t be easy, the new manager has to take charge and he’ll need the respect of the old timers for that to happen.
Sorry, computers won’t help this situation, they’ll probably make it worse.
40 years in software development, commercial cooking, and former restaurant manager, I’m speaking from experience.
I was a cook in a busy breakfast/lunch place (also had a well-regarded dinner service, but the staff/shifts were completely separate) for a long time. It’s just not something that was ever an issue for us. I don’t know if it’s because the way it was setup- meaning stations/equipment and staff- or what. We had a 3-man line (maybe 2 in the winter weekdays) and a salad person. 1 did eggs,1 did griddle, and 1 did breads/plating- at least in the optimal setup. Now if 1 guy is trying to do all those things, I could see it being a mess but also probably wouldn’t consider the place that busy or they would be missing something somewhere (the owner used to complain about the low “profits” every year, but their profits were after paying all wages, food, etc but ALSO paying salaries to people who didn’t even work there- so I know this setup was financially viable for 30+ years). I would add there was no real “manager” and no interference from such. The egg cook was basically the de facto manager. That guy would later work at another restaurant by himself, and as far as I know things ran just as smoothly.
No real restaurant experience, but it sounds like the place is just plain understaffed. Nothing that a short order cook does is so complex that it needs that kind of external coordination. Once you factor in training costs, maintenence, unintended consequences and other potential points of chaos, I doubt it is worth it.
It’s kind of like a GPS in a car. A GPS is very good at what it does, but nobody uses a GPS for every trip that they make-- most people are able to memorize routes to their most common destinations, and a GPS is just going to slow them down. And no GPS is going to be able to make up for someone so dim that they can’t figure out how to get to their office each day without help.
Long time software guy, but with exactly zero restaurant experience …
You’re wanting to create a package that during operation will model the state of all the food being prepared and provide advice on when to start the next item so the components of individual meals and entire tables will complete simultaneously.
To be useful, the model MUST 100% accurately reflect the current state of the real world. Which means the workers MUST make a computer input each time they start or complete a task to keep the computer model’s state in sync with reality.
That fails the project. Harried workers will NOT keep the model accurate, even given the best of intentions. Automation projects succeed when the machinery *does * part or all of the work, not when it simply passively *tracks *the work.
If somehow the machine could, via machine vision and magic pixie fairies, accurately track the real world state and update its model autonomously, then it’d work OK to spit out accurate timely advice. Right now that task requires a human supervisor, which the cooks above have said the industry commonly uses.
Clearly the owners are spilling revenue they’d be able to capture if their kitchen worked better & they could turn tables faster. Management is the key here. The good news is the now-missing revenue provides the resources needed to solve the problem.
Rule #1 of software: Never propose a software solution to a non-software problem. Bad process, bad culture, bad management, bad people, etc. cannot be cured, or even improved, by even excellent software.