The Best Tips for Commercial Kitchen Maintenance

Commercial kitchens are busy places, and one of the most often neglected parts of the whole affair is maintenance. It’s also one of the essential pieces of the puzzle if you’re planning on ensuring the longevity of your equipment and keeping costs down.

Think of it like regular oil changes in your car. You do it and things run smoothly for a long time, you forget… and it’s going to get expensive in a hurry.

Ensuring that things are maintained is sure to save time and money since you can catch things before they become a larger issue.

We have a great tip for you, something which is sure to keep your entire operation running smoothly, but let’s explore why maintenance is so important first.

Equipment Maintenance Saves Money

As a quick comparison: you have a burner which is becoming dangerously clogged in an oven. It’s reaching a point where the problem is likely to be terminal soon.

If it fails, you’ll end up having to wait for us to get the burner element if we don’t have it in stock. The oven is going to be down for the amount of time it takes to install one even if we do have an exact match on hand.

That means you’ll be getting both a bill and losing productivity in your kitchen.

On the other hand, if one of our technicians is there on a call for a fryer and you ask them to do a routine check on the rest of your equipment it can be caught before it experiences total failure. This means you’ll be able to schedule the service for a better time, even if the burner itself isn’t able to be recovered.

Maintenance saves both time and productivity. That’s one of the reasons we recommend you always go through with the checks.

Maintain Equipment… Maintain Employee Morale

One of the biggest benefits most people don’t think of is that regular maintenance can save some rough times for your employees.

As a general rule, people expect restaurants to function like a well-oiled machine at all times. It’s a bit unfair for those on the receiving end, but it’s the truth. With regular maintenance, you can keep morale up since your employees aren’t going to be on the receiving end of abuse nearly as often.

There’s also the cascade effect to consider: employee morale is intertwined with a smooth-running kitchen.

Even a minor failure in the kitchen is going to cause some serious problems when it comes to irate customers.

And frankly, no one wants to deal with that sort of thing.

Keeping Up Your Restaurants Reputation

Whether you’re a newly established restaurant or a long-standing pillar of the community, you probably already know about the importance of online reviews and testimonials when it comes to spreading the word about your food.

Major failures in the kitchen can be understood by most reasonable people, who will be a bit annoyed at the inconvenience but otherwise fine with the way things are.

On the other hand, a party of “Yelp Critics” can take to the internet and drive your star rating down across multiple platforms. It’s a sad truth when the internet is one of the best marketing tools available some people are going to use it

Routine Maintenance Done During Exceptional Service Calls

Things break down. One thing you should definitely give some thought to is having our technicians perform routine maintenance on other equipment while they’re on site doing a bigger job.

By doing this we can spot potential problems before they turn into larger ones.

It might take a bit of time to look things over, and raise your bill just a little bit but the savings will be exceptional over time. It’ll also buy you time if a machine is on its last legs before catastrophic failure, since getting parts can sometimes take more time than you’d like.

Instead of letting your kitchen fall apart like a series of dominos, have a technician look over the whole area when they come in.

Early prevention can save time, money, and reputation. If that doesn’t sound appealing, we don’t know what will.

Scheduling Maintenance

Of course, if your kitchen hasn’t been being maintained then you’re going to want to ensure you have it done at the earliest time possible.

Your machines should be maintained before you hit the time of the year when they’ll be used the most.

That can be as simple as making sure that you’re in tip-top shape before local events like graduations and festivals, or even checking to make sure your ice cream machines aren’t going to fail over the summer.

More importantly: we make it easy to ensure that your kitchen is always running at its best.

Utilize our technicians to prevent problems, not just fix them, and you’re well on your way to a smoother running busine