The Truth About Kitchen Technology

If a hen and a half laid an egg and a half in a day and a half, how long would it take a monkey with a wooden leg to kick the seeds out of a dill pickle? If your kitchen software is free, how long will it take for it to catch up to your operational needs after being installed in your kitchen? If you spurn best-of-breed for an inferior generic solution, how will that solution become a feature-rich star performer in your kitchen? If your chosen systems provider resists integration with your other preferred solutions at all costs, how is that in any way enhancing operational effectiveness and your job security?

The Right Kitchen Technology for Your Restaurant

Failures in logic create unanswerable riddles. Becoming complacent or taking the seemingly easy way to a solution causes recurring painful lessons. There are a few truths that should be taken seriously in your endeavor to provide value to your business:

• Free doesn’t equal value.
• Free doesn’t magically solve your problems.
• Single sourcing doesn’t enable comprehensive operational excellence.

Lack of integration is the death knell for value-add systems in a restaurant. The same could be said for that bell ringing on your career at that company.

Don’t Cheat Yourself Out of the Right Solution

In retriever training, a dog is faced with picking up its target that fell across a pond. The right way and the best way to do that is to go straight into the pond and proceed on a straight line across to the bird/bumper, maintaining focus and not losing site of the target area. The problem is that the shoreline looks much easier. A dog that runs the bank around is said to have ‘cheated’ the mark. Very often, it causes a loss of focus on the target, introduces other distractions, and the dog can get lost or put on a big hunt to finish the job. The perceived difficulty of the obstacle (swimming straight in the pond) makes the ‘cheat’ to the land more compelling. In the same way, the perceived difficulty in dealing with a few vendor partners will cause some to ‘cheat’ towards the perceived easy answer and simply choose single source and free as the ‘best’ solution. However, more often than not, that causes a loss of focus on the problem to be solved in the first place and you end up lost and hunting hard for a way to salvage what was originally tasked. Best-of-breed solutions happen because of extreme learning, diligence, and expertise. The truth is that you can’t afford to let perceived obstacles deter you from the path of feature-rich, elegant, and highly integrated solutions for your business operations. Subscribe to the blog for more interesting restaurant content!

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About the Author

As COO, Andy is involved in our hardware design, production, assembly, and repair depot in addition to overseeing internal Information Technology for QSR. He graduated from the University of Louisville with his Master’s in Engineering and has been involved in restaurant technology for years. In his spare time, you can find Andy training and trialing Retrievers in field work.