How Food Prep Equipment Can Help Restaurants Reduce Costs

For any restaurant, controlling costs is a vital part of operating a successful, long-term business. The challenge is how to maintain a reasonable budget and generate a better bottom line without cutting corners. Food quality and service must provide the best customer experience to garner positive reviews and their return visit. 

Proper and efficient food preparation, starting with the right equipment, can help. Mixers, slicers and food processors, when paired with some general best practices, are an excellent means to both meet customer expectations and reduce costs. 

Gaining Speed and Consistency

Compared to manually mixing ingredients, slicing meats and cheeses or processing fruits and vegetables, food prep equipment can complete the job faster. That helps optimize labor and provides cost savings, since staff members can finish food prep sooner and have the time to take on additional tasks that improve productivity in the kitchen. 

In addition, a commercial mixer can mix larger batches of product, like dough, for greater output. That provides the option to make and sell more menu items like pizzas or flatbreads at a lower cost and a higher profit. 

Consistency is another cost saving advantage of using food prep equipment. For example, if a staff member manually slices a tomato, those slices may be of varying widths and yield. In contrast, a continuous-feed food processor provides consistent volume of output per tomato, which helps control costs by allowing chefs and owners to better predict the amount of produce needed for specific menu items. It also eliminates the downtime and cost for manually cutting replacement batches of fruits or vegetables. 

The same holds true for slicing meats and cheeses with a manual or automatic slicer. The consistency generates cost savings. 
Combination food processors are another option that can help control costs. These combine bowl-style processing for batches of sauce, pesto, hummus and more with continuous-feed food processing of produce, hard cheeses and nuts. Since they combine the flexibility of two machines in one, there is a lower total cost of ownership to the investment, and they also speed production. 

Reducing Waste, Getting Creative

The consistency of menu items prepared with food prep equipment helps reduce waste for unusable product that doesn’t meet quality standards, adding to a restaurant’s cost savings. Using a continuous-feed food processor to julienne carrots, slice mushrooms or dice tomatoes, for example, means that the job is done right the first time — no need to purchase additional produce. 

Also, whole fruits and vegetables last longer than pre-packaged produce, so preparing them with a continuous-feed or combination food processor minimizes waste and the cost for replacing spoiled product. Bypassing pre-packaged produce can sometimes help chefs and restaurant owners avoid markups from their purveyors. 

Chefs and their staff can also get creative with menu items to reduce waste and its associated costs. For instance, using the same fruits and vegetables prepared in a food processor across multiple menu items minimizes the risk of having to dispose of unused product past its prime. Likewise, staff can use a slicer to slice meats and cheeses for both charcuterie boards and artisanal sandwiches to make the most of these products. 

Inventory and Portion control

Buying in bulk and preparing ingredients with a piece of food prep equipment generates cost savings by providing more predictable purchases and inventory control for chefs and owners. For example, it is less expensive to buy multiple large blocks of cheese and grate them with a continuous-feed food processor compared to purchasing bags of grated cheese. Harder cheeses purchased in bulk, like parmesan, can also be frozen for processing later. 

Using a slicer to slice meats and cheeses adds to a kitchen’s cost savings. This equipment provides uniform slices at the thickness selected by the staff member, so it is easier to predict how much of each item will be used on a sandwich. That consistency helps control each portion and its cost, so it is easier to manage inventory. There is less concern of over-purchasing product and generating unnecessary expenses. Chefs know exactly how many chubs of meat or blocks of cheese to order each week and what it will cost them. 

Reducing Costs, Improving Satisfaction

While food prep equipment offers the advantage of cost savings for restaurants in multiple ways, it is also an investment that can help generate a positive customer experience. By controlling quality and consistency, chefs and their staff can create menu items that are not only delicious, but also visually appealing. 

Top Photo courtesy of Hobart.