When starting a food business or restaurant, having a small commercial kitchen gives you a major advantage (versus preparing food in your own personal kitchen). But for the commercial kitchen to best suit you, it must be optimized.
Making just a few small tweaks could impact your output, profitability, and sanity.
1. Create Zones
Configuring a small commercial kitchen is all about space. You have to be smart about every square foot of your kitchen. And while there are multiple strategies for setting up your kitchen, we recommend spreading your kitchen workflow and organizations across different zones.
In a zone-based kitchen, each zone has its own designated function. This may include zones for delivery, storage, food prep, cooking, service, dish return, and cleaning. How you organize these zones – and where they’re laid out concerning each other, can hurt or help your efficiency.
For example, you probably want the dish return zone to be located right next to the cleaning zone. Likewise, storage and food prep should be in close proximity to one another.
2. Organize for Accessibility
When optimizing a commercial kitchen, you want easy access to the items you need precisely when you need them. You should never have to go searching for an item or opening up a bunch of cabinets and drawers to find a specific ingredient or supply. And it’s for this reason that you should avoid closed storage units for any items that do not need to be refrigerated or frozen.
Open shelving not only gives you clean sightlines and visibility of all items in your kitchen but also forces you to be more organized. (Whereas you might just tosspots and pans into a closed cabinet, you’re going to be more meticulous about neatly stacking them if they’re out in the open for all to see.)
3. Maintain Key Systems
When it comes to your kitchen’s main systems, it’s imperative that you stay ahead of things on the maintenance front. In other words, don’t wait until something goes wrong to replace a part or make a fix. Invest in regular monitoring and preventative maintenance.
Take, for example, your walk-in cooler or freezer. This is something you need to regularly maintain. A failure to do so could end up costing you a significant amount of money in spoiled food (should something go wrong). Inspect elements like gaskets and heater wires often, and have a replacement parts supplier on speed dial.
4. Use the FIFO Method for Food
When storing food and ingredients, use the “first in, first out” method – also known as “FIFO.”
As the name suggests, FIFO is a food storage method by which you use items that have been on the shelf the longest (to keep ingredients fresh and avoid spoilage). To do this efficiently, you have to be serious about labeling and placement.
When an item goes into storage (pantry or freezer), it should have a clear expiration date labeled on the packaging. Place your items so the oldest items are at the front and the newer items are at the back.
5. Pay Attention to Local Codes and Regulations
It’s not enough to have an attractive, well-organized kitchen that’s perfectly segmented into an orderly workflow for your business. You also have to take local codes and regulations into careful consideration.
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA), Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), and your state’s Department of Public Health all have strict standards for food safety, storage, preparation, and disposal. And because codes vary between states and cities, it’s important that you pay careful attention to the laws and regulations in your area. You can find out more here.
Set Your Kitchen Up for Success
It doesn’t matter if you have a small commercial kitchen that prepares cupcakes and pastries for local coffee shops, or you’re running a high-end restaurant that brings in massive dinner crowds each evening. If you want to be efficient, profitable, and sane, it starts with a properly optimized kitchen.
Use these tips to get started – but don’t forget to continually optimize as you discover what works.