Maximizing Restaurant Kitchen Efficiency

An efficient restaurant kitchen is like a well-choreographed dance — everything flows smoothly and beautifully together. But just like with a professional dance performance, this level of efficiency doesn’t just happen on its own.

Restaurant kitchen setup can be a challenge, so one of the best things you can do is create kitchen station diagrams.

How to Improve the Efficiency by Creating a Kitchen Station Diagram

Whether you’re building a new restaurant or working with an existing kitchen, creating a kitchen station diagram can help you optimize your cooking stations for maximum efficiency.

Restaurant kitchen planning starts with figuring out which stations you’ll need and where to place them.

To maximize efficiency, you should also have a good idea of which food items will be produced and in what quantities.

Use Your Menu to Choose Kitchen Stations

Go through each menu item and identify exactly what you’ll need to create each one.

Although time-consuming, this step will help you understand what it really takes to prepare each item on your menu.

For example, the kitchen in a restaurant may have:

• Cold prep
• Meat prep
• Fry/bake
• Grill
• Expo

Different tasks will be carried out at these restaurant workstations. At the meat prep station, for example, your staff may cut and marinate meat. The grill and fry stations will be used to cook various menu items.

There are a few advantages to using spreadsheets to outline your menu item preparation. One of the main advantages is that you can create a master list of all tasks that need to happen at each station.

If most or all of your menu items are coming off of the same station, it can create bottlenecks that slow the kitchen staff down.

Knowing what it takes to create each menu item will help make it easier to figure out which stations you’ll need in your kitchen.

Estimate Volumes

If your restaurant is already up and running and you have a pretty static menu, it should be easy to estimate volumes with your POS system data. Using this data, you can estimate how much volume each of your stations would receive.

If you’re still in the planning stages and are building a restaurant kitchen, do some research on your competition and neighborhood to get a better sense of what customers in your area find appealing.

If you know which menu items customers are more likely to order, you can estimate which stations will produce higher volumes and which menu items will be more popular.

Place Appropriate Elements Near Each Station

To maximize efficiency, you’ll need to consider which elements should be placed near each station to move things along.

Consider which items should be placed above, below, left and right of the station. Also, you need to consider which items can be readily located underneath the counter, such as refrigeration or other supplies.

With all of this information in hand — stations, volumes, and supplies — you can begin creating your kitchen station diagrams.

Test Your Diagram

Now that you’ve created a plan, it’s time to take that plan for a test drive.

Print out your diagrams and place those diagrams on each relative table. Choose some sample menu items, and start moving through the stages.

If your restaurant is already up and running, you may want to run your station diagrams past your employees and get some feedback from them.

If you’re running an existing restaurant, it’s important to make sure that you train your employees on the new setup.

Maximizing restaurant kitchen efficiency is not an easy task, and it will take you some time to find the right solution. Listen to feedback from employees. Your employees will be the ones putting your plans into action, so their feedback will help make your kitchen more efficient.

Source: https://mcdonaldpaper.com/blog/how-to-arrange-kitchen-stations