{"id":8875,"date":"2020-08-14T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2020-08-14T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lei.flywheelsites.com\/the-lean-post\/articles\/a-radical-redesign-of-making-crudito-and-all-restaurant-kitchens\/"},"modified":"2020-08-14T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2020-08-14T00:00:00","slug":"a-radical-redesign-of-making-crudito-and-all-restaurant-kitchens","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lean.org\/the-lean-post\/articles\/a-radical-redesign-of-making-crudito-and-all-restaurant-kitchens\/","title":{"rendered":"A Radical Redesign of Making Crudito — and All Restaurant Kitchens"},"content":{"rendered":"

The typical restaurant kitchen wastes more than food. Time, motion, excess labor, and ultimately profits go into the dumpster. For example, a kitchen usually has a cook at each station plus prep cooks handling bulk side\u00a0dishes. The\u00a0layout creates lots of running around and forces close contact, not distancing, as people dash in and out of the walk-in coolers and dish room.<\/em><\/p>\n

Using a few basic continuous improvement tools to better understand the actual work of people in a kitchen, Matt Savas, a team leader at the Lean Enterprise Institute and a fervent neighborhood restaurant foodie, offers a sweeping alternative way to run kitchens for better safety and profitability.<\/em><\/p>\n

Covid-19 has brought devastation to nearly every industry. Perhaps the closest hitting to home – at least mine – is the food service industry.\u00a0I enjoy the\u00a0conviviality\u00a0restaurants bring\u00a0to\u00a0community\u00a0life and\u00a0the joy they\u00a0provide\u00a0to\u00a0customers. Those that have survived through the lockdown now face major challenges with reopening, namely safety and profitability. How can these businesses protect their workers and customers? And how can they make money given capacity constraints and consumer hesitancy to dine out?<\/p>\n

This article does not claim to offer\u00a0final\u00a0solutions to these major challenges. However, it does offer ideas on how to use simple\u00a0continuous improvement\u00a0tools to see where safety and cost problems exist, as well as how to generate ideas on countermeasures.<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s consider a typical commercial kitchen during morning prep. There is a\u00a0cook\u00a0for each station – oven, saut\u00e9, pantry, fry, and grill – gearing up for the lunch and dinner services ahead. Plus, there are two prep cooks handling bulk prep items\u00a0such\u00a0as rice and potatoes that will find their way to most entr\u00e9es. The layout is\u00a0fairly simple\u00a0with a dish room and\u00a0three walk-in coolers storing prepped items and raw ingredients such as fish, meat, and produce. Here is what their movement could look like.<\/p>\n