Food Quality and Consistency

Food quality and consistency is the key factor to ensure customer satisfaction without any exception. Some might think low price attracts customers the most, but what truly enticing customers are the consistent food quality. If the quality of food is relatively good, it is worth paying. Moreover, food quality control is also one of the important criteria to achieve food safety compliance, which gains customer trust towards your food.

Food and beverages industries include central kitchens, commercial kitchens, common kitchens, restaurants, fast-food chains are struggling to maintain consistent food quality at all times. Especially during the period where companies expand their business to a larger scale, they need to hire more experienced workers, which leads to a higher cost of recruitment. The turnover rate of workers is comparatively high in the food industry, thus the most valuable asset would be the food recipes.

Ways to Improve Food Quality and Consistency:

1. Have Detailed Recipes for Food Menu

• Insert all required details in the food recipe

The procedures in food recipes are inevitably important to achieve consistent food quality. Detailed information and procedures must be included like unique tiles, ingredients, itemized weight or volume, and specific preparation instructions. Not only that, other instructions such as cooking time and temperature, serving size, recipe yield, cooking equipment and utensils should be taken into account to standardize the recipes for every worker to replicate.

• Make the complicated steps easy-to-follow

While creating the recipe, ingredients should be categorized into different groups to let others easy to understand. Highlight what you want to emphasize, and bold the important instructional text. Visualize the food making processes step by step by taking pictures or recording videos along with written instructions. If the step-by-step guides are well-written, it reduces extra training time and hiring cost due to no additional required cooking skills is needed.

 

2. Ensure Knowledge Retention

• Do knowledge transfer effectively

To maintain food consistency in restaurant menu, services, and atmosphere, in-depth training should be offered when first hired new staffs. Schedule occasional training refreshers throughout the year for all your staff, and make sure they are regimented and occupied with recipe knowledge. Proper training regarding the standard operating procedures (SOPs) is equally crucial. Other factors like storage temperature, equipment maintenance, and personal hygiene can adversely affect the food quality. Therefore, you must ensure every worker is inducted properly and follow the steps thoroughly, regardless of food recipes or required SOPs.

• Share knowledge with proper documentation

All operation processes and proper procedures should be well-documented, this is the key step towards the goal of food quality and consistency. Food recipes and other detailed information should be gathered and put in one place that is accessible to every authorized worker. Hence, workers can equip themselves with new knowledge even without any guidance.

 

3. Enhance Sustainability by Improvements

• Improve quality control

With mass production, it is particularly difficult to maintain the consistent level of the taste, appearance, and overall quality of food. Owing to many factors, the taste might be different even using the same raw materials or ingredients to cook. Focusing on ingredient quality control ensures you serve your customers with better meals. Establish a system for checking the recipe ingredients and remove those that do not meet your food quality standards. However, make sure that your staffs are trained to understand the system to follow the recipe properly.

 

“ Customers want high-quality food, good service, and good store experience, and most retailers fail to deliver on those.”

– John Mackey – 

• Improve overall preparation

The ultimate goal of improving food quality is to enhance your customer experience. To serve better food, food preparation techniques should be prioritized such as cooking method, temperature, and freshness of ingredients. Chefs should bear in mind the importance of food preparation, and standardize every production for better food quality and consistency.

 

 

What is RMS?

Doing things systematically is highly recommended to save excessive costs and valuable time. This is the main reason why we, Codemax developed and built RMS, a Central Kitchen Solution to improve the food quality and consistency in the F&B industry.

Food recipes, training materials, SOPs can be accessed via web or mobile app anywhere at any time, as long as there is an internet connection. Nevertheless, chefs might think uploading their recipes to the system cause security issues. To prevent information leakage, chefs that created the recipe have the rights to approve and publish their recipe to the authorized workers. An audit log is added to every recipe, which means that there will be records if any changes have been made. Besides recipe management, food costs can be auto-calculated based on the ingredient price.

Delighted to say, recipe management is just one of the best features that RMS serves! Find out more at https://codemax.my/rms-central-kitchen-solution/

Check out the RMS Recipe Manager: