Decrease Restaurant Startup Costs by Digitizing Your Kitchen

04 Apr Decrease Restaurant Startup Costs by Digitizing Your Kitchen

Want to digitize your restaurant to gain an edge over the competition and decrease your restaurant startup costs? Read on to learn about the latest restaurant tech trends taking over everything from scheduling to inventory management.

1. Smarter labor management for your restaurant

You likely have a limited budget, and on top of that, have the headache of managing shifts. You want to make sure you have high-quality staff preparing the food in your restaurant kitchen and serving customers. Sound about right?

You’ll love 7shifts, a staff scheduling app that offers great value for money. Using 7shifts means:

• 80% less time scheduling your restaurant staff
• 1-3% cost saving in labor
• 70% fewer phone calls and texts

The app is recommended by big chains like Panera Bread but is also trusted by small restaurant owners who love the fact that it removes such a big headache for them.

Best of all? It’s free for up to 10 employees!

Always be in control of your scheduling – 7shifts

2.  Let your restaurant kitchen do the cooking for you

Why should your restaurant kitchen stop operating just because you or your chef aren’t there? Innovative restaurant apps and tech allow you to keep meat cooking at just the right temperature, and have it cooked to perfection the next day when you come in. Best of all, apps allow you to check in on your food to ensure the temperature is right, and even get a sneak peek at how it looks.

If you haven’t set up a full wireless restaurant kitchen yet, don’t worry. There are great restaurant tech solutions out there to help you. The Meater thermometer and app removes all the guesswork from cooking and lets you monitor your food prep from your phone. There’s even a kit for restaurants that lets you monitor your cooks on the go, connect to Amazon Alexa and track everything in real-time.

Then, of course, there are food delivery apps that deliver food without your full front-of-house staff having to be there. With these food delivery apps, you can be open for longer, and keep customers happy even when you aren’t there.

3. Restaurant apps help you stay connected 24/7

Gone are the days of walking into your restaurant only to find the fridges weren’t working and you’ve lost all your fresh ingredients.

Today, restaurant tech can help you monitor and prevent disasters before they happen. VariSense is one company that lets you monitor critical systems, sending you alerts and ensuring no nasty surprises, all through restaurant apps.

Connect your phone to ovens, fryers, and refrigerators, where sensors are being used to monitor and adjust everything from critical systems to maintenance areas. Worried about how much oil you have left? There’s an app for that too. Whether you’re running a Mexican restaurant, Chinese restaurant, Italian restaurant or anything else, you’ll find an app that can make things cheaper, smarter, quicker and better.

4. Automated order flow

Advances in technology mean that more of your business can – and should – be automated. Everything can be automated, from communication between restaurant customers and the restaurant kitchen to orders from the kitchen to key suppliers.

Automation can also:

• Manage reservations
• Assist with inventory management
• Predict what quantities of ingredients will be needed
• Even match ingredients to regular customers

In Beijing, Haidilao partnered with Panasonic to create a fully automated kitchen and has plans to roll out 5,000 such locations worldwide.

And of course, there is the Spyce restaurant. Started by MIT graduates, it’s the world’s first restaurant featuring a robotic kitchen that cooks complex meals. Partnering with Michelin-Star Chef Daniel Boulud, the Spyce robotic kitchen makes a complete meal in 3 minutes or less, with robotic arms mixing, chopping, and frying!

5. Food safety

The sight of food safety inspectors walking in can strike fear into the heart of every restaurant owner. With the help of technology, you can say goodbye to this fear, and be prepared, calm and confident for the visit.

Chains like the Hard Rock Cafe and Shake Shack use technology from ComplianceMate for everything food safety-related. From equipment monitoring to online checklists, the digital kitchen has become a reality.

With sensors able to record temperatures and other data from around the restaurant, you can have everything up-to-date and pre-checked, and generate the right reports with just a few clicks. No more rushing around, no more stress.

Restaurant Tech and its Ability to Decrease Restaurant Startup Costs

When talking about how restaurant tech and digitization are revolutionizing the way a restaurant kitchen is being run today, we can’t forget to mention a simple, effective and low-cost solution for inventory management. The Cheetah inventory management solution will help you save time, money and energy. And since Cheetah uses the latest inventory management technologies, you get the best quality and faster deliveries, for less!