Skip navigation
Restaurant Show
Equipment innovation focuses on efficiency, consistency, safety

Equipment innovation focuses on efficiency, consistency, safety

<p><em>This is part of NRN&rsquo;s special coverage of the 2016 NRA Show, being held in Chicago, May 21-24. Visit <a href="http://nrn.com/">NRN.com</a> for the latest coverage from the show, plus follow us on <a href="http://twitter.com/nrnonline" target="_blank">Twitter</a> and <a href="http://facebook.com/restaurantnews" target="_blank">Facebook</a>.</em></p>

Auto Mist

Let’s face it: The NRA Show is about the equipment. It’s where restaurant operators go to find the latest gadgets and devices that will help their profits go through the roof while helping them avoid that roof from burning down.

The event has hosted its share of attention-getting centerpieces. Over the years, the conference has highlighted robots that make salad, robots that make ice cream sundaes and robots that make French fries.

But the show also highlights equipment that can literally change the game in the industry. Equipment this year promised to help operators improve consistency, efficiency and safety. At a time when costs for labor, healthcare and insurance are all going through the roof, such issues were top-of-mind for many of the more than 66,000 attendees who wandered the halls of McCormick Place in Chicago.

[CHARTBEAT:3]

Suffice to say, a complete accounting of all the interesting equipment on display is near impossible. But here are a few pieces we found interesting:

Auto Mist: It’s a good bet that most operators would prefer not burning their restaurant to the ground. Unfortunately, in a place where grease meets heat, such things can happen.

A quarter of restaurant fires originate from the grill, said Mark Copeland, the chief marketing officer at Mendota Heights, Minn.-based Restaurant Technologies Inc. One problem: The hood and flue above the grill is often coated with grease, sometimes severely so, and if it hasn’t been cleaned recently, the results can be disaster.

“Once a fire gets into the flue, the fire department stops fighting it,” Copeland said, noting that it’s too dangerous for firefighters to stop those fires.

Restaurant Technologies’ Auto Mist is designed to prevent that problem. The system automatically cleans hoods and flues, spraying them with a combination of water and a special cleaner periodically throughout the day from a system of pipes. It then drains into a container that’s emptied at the end of the day.

Typically, Copeland said, restaurants will periodically employ cleaning companies to clean the hoods and flues of grease, sometimes taking hours to do so. If the cleaning is done during closing, then the restaurant has to pay a manager to stay on. If the restaurant is open 24 hours, it has to close. 

Restaurant Technologies bought the rights to the device from its inventors, one of whom was a restaurant owner who lost his restaurant to a fire from just such a situation, Copeland said.

Crown Grill: It’s true that grills that can cook a burger on both sides simultaneously have been around for decades. 

But the latest iteration of Taylor’s Crown Grill is advanced enough to have won a Kitchen Innovations Award. This one comes with a touchscreen interface and can be tailored at any time to prepare a wide variety of items, from eggs and pancakes to burgers, steak and chicken. It also cuts cooking times by two-thirds.

The programming can be done from a central location, so a restaurant chain with multiple locations can program machines for its entire system, emailing the programs to managers who then load the specifications to the grill via USB.

That can help chains with both consistency and efficiency, ensuring that devices are set to the exact specifications at all locations — such as the height of the top portion of the grill, which comes down and raises automatically, as well as how long it’s down for. 

“It’s a good, quick and easy way to field a new menu,” said Robert Delach, managing director at Taylor’s China distribution unit.

The grill has a standby mode that can save on energy costs, for instance, and it has a cleaning mode that Taylor executives say can reduce grill cleaning time from an hour to about 10 minutes. 

During a demonstration, chefs made a thick hamburger, then turned around and cooked both bacon and a chicken breast.

Rational KitchenManagement System: Central device control was a theme at the show. While much press has focused on customer-facing technology, like mobile ordering and app development, some of the most interesting innovations are in equipment.

Rational’s KitchenManagement System is one such innovation. The system is software that enables operators to control up to 30 of Rational’s combi ovens from a central computer. 

The system essentially gives chefs and operators a remote control — the system is installed via USB stick — enabling them to prepare cooking sequences and distribute them to all of their appliances at once. That way, the chefs don’t have to program each individual oven. 

“It’s more efficient if you have more than one unit,” said Sebastian Lay, a product manager with Rational. He said that franchisees and multi-unit operators prefer that kind of efficiency and consistency.

Contact Jonathan Maze at [email protected]
Follow him on Twitter: @jonathanmaze

Hide comments

Comments

  • Allowed HTML tags: <em> <strong> <blockquote> <br> <p>

Plain text

  • No HTML tags allowed.
  • Web page addresses and e-mail addresses turn into links automatically.
  • Lines and paragraphs break automatically.
Publish