3 ways to reduce dark kitchen maintenance costs

Often maintenance costs are looked at as a burden and viewed as a negative to a restaurant’s bottom line. However, having an efficient maintenance plan can help reduce maintenance costs and actually bring a positive return-on-investment by extending your equipment life and avoiding costly unexpected repairs.

Coming up with a maintenance plan isn’t complicated when you have a clear idea of what you should do. Here are three things you should incorporate into your plan to reduce maintenance costs for a dark kitchen:

• Perform regularly scheduled maintenance

• Incorporate maintenance checklists

• Add condition monitoring

Perform regularly scheduled maintenance

Most dark kitchens use a reactive maintenance plan to maintain their equipment. This means that for most dark kitchens are only performing service to their equipment when there is a breakdown that needs addressing

Unfortunately, operating reactively is costly, not only in terms of labor and repair but also because breakdowns can lead to unnecessary shutdowns and slowdowns in delivery time. These consequences can lead to profit loss and damage to your brand from bad reviews.

To combat the increasing cost of reactive maintenance, performing regularly scheduled or preventive maintenance is important. While preventive maintenance may have a larger initial cost, it saves money in the long term.

Savings happen in the form of reduced downtimes, increases in the lifespan of the equipment, and decreases in high-cost repairs. 

For example, even if you hired a maintenance technician to perform the planned maintenance of your refrigerators, it would still cost less than an emergency repair, as emergency service tends to be double the cost of scheduled service. Furthermore, with increased asset life, you improve the value of your kitchen to possible tenants for owners of rental-based dark kitchens.

Benefits:

• Increases lifespan of equipment

• Increases asset value

• Reduces unexpected breakdowns

Incorporate maintenance checklists

Adding a maintenance checklist to your ghost kitchen will help streamline the maintenance processes of your kitchen. When attempting to reduce maintenance costs, it is important to ensure that no cost-reducing preventive maintenance tasks fall through the cracks.

Maintenance checklists ensure consistency and accountability and reduce errors for your staff.

For example, it is recommended that you perform maintenance tasks on a refrigerator at regular intervals. In this case, a maintenance checklist can include the following:

• Clean - Clean all coils, drain pans, and tubes.

• Inspect - Check gaskets, air filters, and seals

• Monitor - Temperature,  thermostat operations, and cycle.

A useful checklist will outline all the important steps required to maintain restaurant equipment. The goal is to standardize the maintenance process, ensuring that maintenance tasks are done thoroughly and accurately, regardless of who completes them.

When creating a checklist, keep it as simple as possible and avoid complex steps, as they can cause confusion. Use visuals like photographs or diagrams where applicable. 

Benefits:

• Streamlines maintenance processes

• Allows for increased oversight

• Reduces errors

• Ensures consistency

Add condition monitoring

Condition monitoring, mostly used in refrigerators, allows you to detect changes in temperature, moisture, and humidity. These fluctuations can be caused by an employee forgetting to shut the door or an equipment breakdown. Using these sensors can reduce labor costs and allow for faster responses to incidents.

For example, the walk-in refrigeration sensor notifies the management of a minor change in temperature. It could be that the refrigerator needs maintenance, like cleaning the condenser coils. This information can allow you to schedule this task only when it is needed rather than weekly, saving money on labor.

Furthermore, because of the increase in data, you will know exactly when a particular piece of equipment is beginning to show signs of failure. This will allow you to schedule necessary maintenance outside of emergency settings, saving money on service costs that can drastically increase depending on the need.

The alerts also allow management to know sooner when a catastrophic failure is occurring making it easier to save things from spoilage in the event of a refrigeration problem. 

Benefits: 

• Real-time alerts

• Improves response time to equipment malfunction

• Reduces maintenance labor costs

• Prevents food spoilage

• Reduces chances of health code violations

Running a dark kitchen streamlines and optimizes business operations, allowing for increased efficiency and effectiveness. Prioritizing maintenance leads to cost reduction, improved productivity, and enhanced brand reputation. This approach creates a virtual kitchen designed for both customer satisfaction and long-term success..