Central kitchen industry insights and technical notes
When dosing robots first arrived in the kitchen, everyone treated them as a machine that saves one person: weighing and dispensing a…
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Back-of-house automation has moved quickly these past two years — cooking robots, rice lines and dishwashers have taken a large shar…
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Barbecue is one of the most labour-dependent categories in food service: skewering, turning, glazing, dusting and watching the fire,…
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Rice is the staple of fast food and contract catering. Several hundred or several thousand rice portions a day, all made by hand, is…
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After years in catering equipment I have seen too many robots bought and left gathering dust. Looking back, almost none failed becau…
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Equipment sellers like to say a robot works anywhere. Buyers cannot think that way. A fast-food outlet, a staff canteen, a mall unit…
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When a small restaurant owner asks whether to install a robot, the answer is not simply yes or no — it depends on which basis you us…
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Many owners ask only about the price before buying a robot, and only afterwards discover the three running costs: daily cleaning, co…
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Equipment that will not fit, or that fits and then works badly, is almost never the machine's fault — nobody checked the site before…
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The kitchen has heat sterilisation; the front of house and the private rooms have always been done by hand with a spray bottle — tir…
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The most tedious post in the back of house and the first to be automated. The name is new, the purchasing logic is not: capacity, wa…
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Both processes are proven — but proven equipment and a shop that makes money are two different things. What the two look like in rea…
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Noodles are the hardest category to standardise and the one with the highest labour cost — three routes fix three different business…
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The hard part of a milk tea robot is not making the drink but handling the toppings and shelf life; and the maths only works above a…
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A coffee robot point is not a café: location, machine format, revenue per square metre and upkeep decide whether a unit earns 3,000 …
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Autonomous wheeled, rail-guided AGV and humanoid serving robots are three different technologies with very different costs and limit…
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The step most likely to fail in a central kitchen is not the wok but dosing — manual error runs 5 to 15 per cent; how to put a numbe…
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Why two suppliers quote 300 and 500 portions an hour for the same machine — portion size, dish type, cycle time and cleaning exclude…
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Wok hei broken down into three measurable engineering variables — pan heat-up rate, temperature control accuracy and tossing coverag…
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A practical four-part cost framework — labour, taste consistency, peak capacity and reliability — for owners deciding whether to ins…
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