Takeout and delivery has only gotten more complicated since the rise of online ordering and third-party companies that focus solely on food delivery. Off-premise dining – an option that used to be limited by whether or not the restaurant had the ability to offer it – is now a benefit most restaurants can readily bestow, especially if they are located in bigger cities.
While many restaurants see this as an opportunity to easily expand their customer base, there’s more to consider than simply adding the service to your website or partnering with a delivery company.
When your orders are not limited by the amount of people you can accommodate in your dining area, there is always the possibility that your current staff size and production capabilities cannot handle the workload. To address this potential issue, you will need to focus on several areas to ensure your off-premise dining plan will function properly: production flexibility, workspace integration, and dispatch.
Production flexibility is important because you never know when you will get an influx of online orders. Sometimes, your current kitchen operation can easily handle the extra work; other times, you may also be experiencing in-house rush hour – if you don’t have the flexibility to handle both kinds of orders at once, chances are a bottleneck will occur and all of your customers will suffer.
To help rectify this, you can incorporate flexible equipment into your kitchen workflow, as well as portable worktables that can easily be used to create a new work area for online order processing if needed.
This ties in easily with workspace integration. If your restaurant does only a modest amount of business via takeout and delivery for off-premise dining, a small designated area to package and store the orders (with the flexibility to convert more space on an as-needed basis) is probably sufficient.
If your volume is more significant, having a separate production line for order processing, packaging, and pickup is recommended.
Rapids Equipment & Smallwares Recommendations for Off-Premise Dining Order Processing
This stage includes everything from initial order receipt through meal packaging. Organization and portability is key to making this area efficient.
Start with a workstation. You can either put one together yourself with a 48″ worktable, worktable drawers, and a 48″ overshelf, or you can get a kit that includes a worktable and overshelf, then customize it from there.
In conjunction with an order rail (and guest checks if your system isn’t set up for transferring orders electronically), this station is great for putting your order together. The overshelves will hold your to-go containers (it’s easier to keep them organized when they aren’t cluttering up your workspace). The drawers will hold any smallwares, and if you incorporate a condiment organizer for your ketchup packets, silverware, lids, etc. into your arrangement, you should be able to put together a workflow that is quick and efficient.
If you need to keep things flexible, you can add casters to your worktable for portability.
Because there may be a delay between when you finish packaging the order and when the customer or third-party delivery company picks it up, it’s incredibly important to have a holding area where you can maintain food-safe temperatures.
This area, depending on your menu, should be split into two areas: hot holding and cold holding.
To keep food warm, there are a number of options such as hot shelves, bulb warmers, and heat lamps. You can also use an insulated food and beverage carrier, which will conveniently work for both hot and cold applications.
To keep food cold, the aforementioned insulated carrier will work, or you can use a tabletop merchandiser. If you are a high-volume facility, an undercounter refrigerator is a good choice. You can swap out the worktable in your processing station for a Volition 48″ undercounter refrigerator, or you opt to extend your workspace by getting a 27″ Volition undercounter and placing it next to your worktable. The Volition units come with casters, and the doors are field reversible, which provides you with additional flexibility.
To promote efficiency, choosing a off-premise dining pickup area that is separate from where your in-house customers are waiting to be seated is important. Otherwise, this can cause holdups for both parties.
Ideally, your kitchen is set up so the pickup area can be your order processing workstation – you won’t need an additional person to man a separate station, and everything will be easily accessible.
If not, you can add an additional hostess station with a sign that specifies “Pick-up Area” to make it easy for customers and third-party companies to identify where they need to go.
If you offer in-house delivery services, Rapids offers a collection of delivery bags and food carriers that will help you get your food to its destination at the appropriate temperature.
