Is your restaurant operation as efficient as it can be?
That seems to be the million-dollar question these days as we emerge from three years of uncertainties, unprecedented costs, labor shortages and supply chain disruptions.
The question was posed as part of Nation’s Restaurant News’ Emerging Restaurateur Live Learning Series, a panel that included Andrew K. Smith, managing director of Savory Restaurant Fund, Chris Artinian, president/CEO of Condado Tacos, Justin Rosenberg, founder/CEO of Honeygrow, and Chef John Csukor, head of culinary at Entegra. The discussion was moderated by Sam Oches, editor-in-chief of Nation’s Restaurant News, who tasked panelists with distilling down what efficiency means now and how to achieve it.
Smith said it remains critical for operators not to compromise experience and quality when they’re pursuing efficiencies.
“We can’t use the old ways anymore. Efficiency is doing more with less but having the same results, experience, and quality and, in some cases, even better,” he said. “How are we more efficient without losing the heart and soul and authenticity of what our brands are? If you cut back too much, you might actually cut off your nose to spite your face.”
Essentially that means operators are tasked with looking at every facet of the business – from the menu to the front of the house to the back of the house – to better understand efficient solutions. Is your restaurant right-sized so that you’re optimizing your square footage without compromising dine-in traffic? Can you make more with less ingredients on your SKU list? Are you cross training your teams so you can do more with fewer employees? All of these decisions, Smith adds, should be driven by customer experience.
“You can’t go from a product that makes you who you are to a lesser quality product and hope the customers are not going to be fooled by that,” he said. “If you’re providing excellent customer service – minimizing errors, resolving complaints in a timely manner – those things make your business more efficient. All of us running around trying to figure out how to be better without focusing on the customer in front of us makes us inefficient.”
Removing friction for customers and employees
Efficiency, in other words, means removing friction for consumers. But it also means removing friction for employees so they can execute on that first objective. For Rosenberg, that means keeping the menu simple. Honeygrow, for instance, has tested sandwiches, wraps and gelato throughout the past few years, but menu items that don’t pass the profitability test are nixed.
“It’s easy to get carried away but it’s important to keep it as simple as possible while making sure the guests are coming back as much as possible,” he said. “Will it produce a good profit margin, is it easy to execute and will it keep folks coming back?”
Condado Tacos is currently testing automation in the back of the house – specifically Flippy Light – which is estimated to save eight-to-10 hours of labor a day away from the fryer.
“We fry a lot of tortillas,” Artinian said, adding that it’s early in the test but he’s optimistic it will yield results. If so, Condado will shift those labor hours elsewhere, again, with the goal of achieving more efficiency.
“This industry has evolved and it’s now harder to find folks who want to do menial tasks. Hopefully we can eliminate some of those tasks with automation. We look at tech and automaton always to create a better product and ensure consistency, but also continue to invest in our people. if we can invest a little more in our people and do more with less, that allows us more time to work with folks, shoulder to shoulder. By minimizing some of the tasks with lesser impact on quality of product through automation or tools of the like, it allows us to invest in people to take on the ability to coach and make sure the product is as good as it can be,” Artinian said.
He adds that he’s an “old-school, fine dining guy” who never would have thought of robotics in the past. But that’s where we are as an industry, and it points to the necessity of doing more with less labor while also leveraging more accessible technology. Of note, the restaurant industry remains about 2.2% below pre-pandemic employment levels.
“The tech piece from the front of the house to the back of the house has been amazingly important to us because we’re operating our business with less people,” he said.
Smith adds that it’s important for operators to use technology in a deeper way.
“When you use Excel, you probably only use 1% of the functions on Excel. We’ve looked at our entire tech stack and instead of adding more thinking it’ll make us more efficient, we said let’s go deeper than wider,” he said. “Let’s not have more tech to solve problems, let’s use the core tech we need for each discipline, go deeper and learn more about how they can help us be more efficient and profitable by using their systems better.”
What’s within your control?
Ultimately, achieving efficiencies means understanding the fundamentals of your business and going back to the basics. Or, as Csukor describes it, embracing a “freshman” mentality.
“Think about your freshman year in the industry where we were working at our sharpest – inventorying the most, making sure the kitchen was clean. Fundamentally, start with the things you can control. Look at the primary phases of the kitchen. Those that are watching where there could be a station that’s bogging, that could be personnel, training or a tech opportunity,” he said. "Be wiling to reduce some of the things dragging the kitchen down. It’s really Kitchen 101 – going back to look at every ingredient for two, three, five, 10 things you can do with it is critically important. Work like a freshman with heightened awareness. Now is the time to consider these things.”
Nation’s Restaurant News’ Emerging Restaurateur Live Learning Series is available on demand and can be accessed through this link.
