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Innovation: There’s a jet-engine roaring out of my fryer

Innovation: There’s a jet-engine roaring out of my fryer

Editor’s note: The author is partner, Pecinka-Ferri Associates, a foodservice equipment agent in New Jersey. The guest column is part of The Schechter Report and NRN’s content partnership, and the views do not necessarily reflect those of Nation’s Restaurant News.

Did you ever have the sneaking suspicion that what you were being told about foodservice equipment performance was slightly inaccurate?

As manufacturers’ reps, we respond to lots of technical questions and equipment reviews from our end-user clients, but the one cited in the title above was particularly disturbing. One of our clients had called in to the dealer to complain about flames shooting from their new fryers.

I had been skeptical when it was first proposed to upgrade this pizza shop from economy equipment to high-efficiency deep fryers. But, after all, this independent restaurant was an extremely high volume store. The sale, installation and demonstrations all went off without a hitch. The staff loved the equipment. It kept up with demand. It was easy to use. Move onto the next opportunity, right? Wrong.

Three months after installation, the phone calls started. “The equipment works great during the day, but when we start it up in the morning we get a plume of fire shooting up from the flue,” the operator’s colleagues told us. Or, rather, that’s what they should have said. But, instead, the message we got had already been translated from the original kitchen-Spanglish to the operator’s kitchen-Italian to dealer lingo, then to our receptionist. By the time it finally got to me, the communication was that the fryers are “On fire every day and that if we don’t fix it today they are going to put ‘our’ fryers out on the street.”

Equipment service agents were sent in, three times! No one could find anything wrong. We decided to investigate ourselves.

One of our reps showed up early enough to watch this pizza shop’s staff start up the equipment, stuck around through meal service and ultimately saw the problem. Sure enough: flame thrower! We’d never seen anything like it. The factory service department couldn’t figure it out.

This operation’s fry-cook had decided that french fries would drain faster with a blast of heat from the flu. So, every batch got drained down the flu, by resting the fry basket on top. It made a great, crispy, hot french fry, but it also caused a grease fire in the flue every time the fryer was started up. A simple correction in operational procedure, and we haven’t heard of any problems with the fryers since.

Our industry continues to roll out ever more sophisticated equipment (particularly during NAFEM years). It seems as if each demonstration we do is on a new software version of a piece of equipment’s operating controls. Ah, training, where would we be without it? Who pays for the multiple re-trainings in the high turnover environment of our end-users? Who trains the trainers?
 

TAGS: Operations
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