How to improve food service in a busy cafe environment

On an average Sunday morning in a busy café, hundreds of dishes come out of the kitchen within a few hours. Service must be quick and food must be of an excellent standard, as customers’ expectations are becoming increasingly high due to our extremely competitive market, always able to offer the best breakfast experience.

Unfortunately, it’s not always possible to tick all the boxes in the long requirements list of “perfect catering”. Quality ingredients, food safety and staff organisation represent key factors that should be continuously monitored and carefully planned if you don’t want your business to incur a severe loss of profits (and bad reputation) due to poor service.

Technology is absolutely playing a fundamental role when it comes to catering.  Cafes can benefit incredibly from improving their kitchen organisation with an efficient refrigeration system that prevents food contamination and prolongs food shelf life. Fridges and freezers cannot be enough if you need to meet a busy catering environment that involves quality and speed of service at the same time.

Frozen food isn’t always the right solution as the difference in quality with fresh food is well known. Although daily supplies of fresh food involve a considerable waste of staff energy focused on preparation and resources due to oversupply or undersupply.

With multifunction blast chillers you can adjust the temperature from -40°C to +35° C, humidity from 40% to 95% and ventilation intensity from 30% to 100%, an innovation that allows a single unit to perform a surprising number of functions. Bacteria multiply faster between +8 ° C and +68 ° C, blast chilling is a treatment that allows you to bring the food temperature down to + 3 °C from the cooking temperature in a very short time. This treatment eliminates dangerous bacteria that can grow in foods like salmon, eggs and bacon.

Also, blast freezing is not the same as freezing. Blast chillers can rapidly reduce the air temperature -40°C by micro crystalising the water within the cells of the food. This means that the food will not lose any liquid during the thawing process. Traditional freezers are unable to achieve such a low temperature, resulting in prolonged freezing times. This causes the water to form into large crystals which destroy the fibres and leads to a loss of vitamins and nutrients, compromising the quality of the food.

Blast frozen food keeps the original organoleptic characteristics, simple frozen food doesn’t. When you regenerate blast frozen food it keeps the same flavour, texture and properties of fresh food or freshly cooked food. You can now plan and schedule food preparation in advance. Consider concentrating the entire weekly preparation in only 2 days; You are not just saving time, you are also improving your staff workflow and quality of service.

Thanks to these amazing features, you can also optimise your food stock, by purchasing certain ingredients when the price is lower.  You can buy best quality meats and vegetables when the offer is larger and the price at its best and then blast freeze everything in single-use portions that you can use at your convenience.