How to maintain consistent food taste?
Think McDonald’s.
Think fries.
You trust the product blindly. Because there is a consistency in taste, texture no matter which outlet across the globe it is churned out from.
It is something to rely on when you order food from Mc D’s. But what could be the secret behind consistency? Do you also want your cloud kitchen to have an Mc D-like recall amongst your hyperlocal customer base? Then standardization of recipe is the name of the game for you!
Your first-order customer might have landed at the steps of your website/app through word-of-mouth or search or the omnipresent social media. Your repeat-order customers come back to you with the expectation of eating the exact food they had fallen in love with.
Through a threefold process of recipe management, you can rise to meet these expectations and keep those glowing reviews coming in.
- Ace the Testing Ground
Before you have achieved your mouth-watering air-tight recipe, you would most likely be in the testing phase. This is when you are deciding on the suppliers, exact ingredients, and the cooking processes.
Your decisions here will leave a lasting impact on your food and how consistent its taste remains. The way to ace this game is to ideally ensure that your suppliers and grade of ingredients don’t keep on changing. Having a fixed set of vendors and products will lead to more or less standardization in process and taste, which is the key for any kitchen if it wants to be in the business for a long haul.
- Standardization of the Recipes and Maintaining the Records
To really make sure that the food is consistent every time in your cloud kitchen, you need to record the recipes. You must understand the process of making each dish and its nuances. For example, a change in temperature of the oven or difference in preservation technique may drastically alter the taste. So, it would do good to keep records of all such factors that contribute to your recipe. Preservation of base gravies with taste intact is an essential and a cost-effective way of maintaining taste consistency and cold storages are your go-to places. But ensure the cold-storages are perfectly temperature controlled.
Some kitchen operators still rely on excel sheets. However, to reduce discrepancies, you must get a good recipe management software. After all, your food is the star of your business!
A sound recipe management software will, above all, maintain records of the exact quantities of each ingredient per plate and make these records tamper-proof. The fact that it also helps to calculate plate costs and manage inventory is a cherry on the cake.
- Regular Training
Despite everything that you could have thought of to make your recipe air-tight, the final onus rests in the hands of the chefs. With their expertise, they can wield out amazing dishes that have the power to make the customers keep coming back. But the question for you is- are your chefs trained to re-create the magic every time, resulting in the same, consistent taste?
The need for proper, regular, and interactive training cannot be stressed enough! Taste consistency can only be as accurate as the chefs making the food. The training should include how to strategically feed data to recipe management software, how to reproduce dishes with minimum waste and redundancies, and how to standardize the taste.
While you are busy getting the ingredients, the recipe, and the chefs onboard your goal, do not miss out on the external variables that too can change the taste of the food.
Have you noticed that your food gets soggy quickly in the monsoon or doesn’t yield as quickly in winter? To avoid these problems, make sure that the temperature, humidity, and airflow are always kept under control by using apparatus for each variable. For example, a smart humidification system can help along with an HVAC with better humidity controls or dehumidifiers. Similarly, IoT equipment with temperature sensors can also save you money in the long run. They are scalable, reliable and smart, just like your cloud kitchen!
“Chal aaj XYZ se order karte hain, their food is bang on everytime”, is the recall you’d want to create amongst your customers. So, act towards it and get the processes right before you start dishing out orders!
