Keeping Commercial Catering Equipment Efficient

Commercial catering equipment is specifically engineered to withstand the heavy-duty

daily use but all commercial equipment requires a regular service schedule to ensure your investment is kept at peak performance. The time, effort and money you invested into purchasing absolutely the best piece of equipment for your application needs to be protected through regular servicing and correct maintenance procedures.

Although improving and certainly better than it was years ago, still today a higher than desired percentage of kitchen equipment isn't maintained on a regular basis. This is despite the fact that routine visits by service engineers fine-tune to ensure everything runs at peak efficiency and provides maximum life expectancy.

It seems that many business owners are hesitant at committing to service contracts because of the cost involved and perhaps their initial belief that their internal procedures will suffice. However, experience shows that regular care and attention probably won't happen on a regular basis and there are certain items that require technical experience to perform the maintenance.

In addition many people still run on false economies. The vision and attention to the up front hard costs seemingly mask the actual real costs or soft costs that don't get factored into the equation. Heavy daily use will lead to natural wear and tear that leads to parts wearing out and failures. A simple door gasket, a clogged burner, a Loose door hinge can all result in higher operating costs through higher energy usage, slowing down of orders, frustration in the kitchen and on the floor, loss of product quality standards and worse still falling customer satisfaction. A customer that had to wait to long for their meal will be unhappy, will vent, will tell their friends about the poor service, the time it took for the meal to arrive and probably won't come back.

Ok so this might been an extreme illustration however it does highlight what can happen if your servicing and maintenance program caused failure on a busy night. It's just not worth the risk particularly if you did invest into the purchasing process correctly. Industry leaders and experts all advocate that maintenance should be planned and hence a proactive strategic element within your business model. Simply put your catering equipment will last longer, will not have knock on breakdown effects from one part wearing out to effect another part and so on and of course will deliver your return on investment performance.

Cleaning is a critical part of maintaining equipment efficiency and avoiding equipment failure. From food spilling into all sorts of areas of catering equipment reducing heat distribution efficiencies to blocking gas burners as well as being unhygienic of course.

With fryers for example the gunk that build up in the cool areas can trap heat and cause wastage in energy use as well as contributing to corrosion. One of the other hidden costs with poorly cleaned equipment is that if you do need to call out a serviceman to repair an equipment failure their costs are based on time and the last thing you want to do is pay the serviceman to clean your equipment so that he can then go ahead and commence the troubleshooting and eventual repair.

The moral to the story is to invest wisely in the purchasing process for your commercial catering equipment needs and then to protect your investment by not focusing on the obvious hard costs of maintenance but the hidden and real costs to your business and your investment of not having a regular service and cleaning schedule.

Copyright (c) 2010 Morel Hudson

by: Morel Hudson

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