We’ve got This: How Delivery Kitchens let you Concentrate on your Customer’s Needs

Introduction

Managing a kitchen and building a reputation is a tough job. Hospitality has a huge variety of pressures to go along with the buzz and satisfaction successful professionals get from this most demanding of professions.

It’s an accepted part of the sector: long hours and high pressure. These demands come with costs and make the job of concentrating on the experience of your customers that much harder.

Well, delivery-only or Dark kitchens can help with that.

They aren’t inherently easier to manage – but the way kitchens are typically designed and run in this sector can help. These advantages create time and space for kitchen pros to concentrate on providing the best service to their customers and, subsequently, build a successful business.

Below I explain how they can help you focus on what matters and win over more customers.

Pure Production

Kitchens in a normal hospitality environment are hotbeds of distraction and disruption – special requests from customers, front of house staff looking for condiments, complaints mean meals might have to be cooked again, or an additional basket of fries is needed, which all stops the production staff from achieving peak performance.

With a kitchen dedicated solely to production for delivery, it becomes a more straightforward process to achieve efficiency and speed with reduced stress. No front of house asking for special orders, no maitre’d coming in to find napkins, not a single distraction from your orders and getting the food ready for delivery, to the highest standards.

With a single focus, it becomes much simpler to produce your best food fast and wow your customers quickly.

Design excellence makes a difference

The key with any commercial kitchen is to create a good kitchen flow that helps it operate with greater efficiency, and therefore at a lower cost.

Designers who have been working with foodservice professionals for decades can create a simple layout for your kitchen that aids efficiency, avoids cross-contamination, and creates an environment in which the best teams can flourish.

Our modular delivery kitchens, for example, are based on a model that has been developed and refined over 30 years to create the perfect production flow. We have more than 55 years of experience in our design team, so they can create a kitchen, based on your proposed menu, that will not just do the job, but actively help to speed up your production process and reduce friction so it’s easier to produce your menu quickly.

Elsewhere in the sector, kitchens are based on basic templates built around key concepts of flow and storage efficiency that allow you to slot in the specialist equipment you need for your menu without stress or difficulty, and then get down to the business of building your brand, without the pressure.

Maintenance = someone else’s problem

Equipment is vital to the success of any commercial kitchen. A dark kitchen is a specialist space, designed to efficiently produce high-quality food quickly. Any disruption from equipment breakdown could be fatal to its operation.

So it’s a good thing that most Dark Kitchen operations make sure equipment is handled quickly and efficiently.

If you are using one of the major delivery apps, or cloud-kitchen provider networks, or if you rent from a kitchen provider like PKL, maintenance is included in the rental or license fee you pay.

If a problem occurs, you call a central number, and technical teams are on hand to diagnose and fix problems fast. We find that 80-90% of problems can be fixed over the phone with an engineer’s expert advice, which is the ideal solution – but when more is needed, often engineers are on-call nearby to get your problem sorted quickly and easily.

Conclusion

A delivery-only commercial kitchen, or dark kitchen, is a well-designed and efficient production tool that helps the best in hospitality produce great food quickly, building a reputation for your brand that will allow you to create a successful delivery-only business more quickly than any other enterprise in hospitality.