Operators, dealers and designers say foodservice kitchens, equipment and technologies are evolving rapidly to meet radically different consumer demands and economic imperatives.

For a conservative, traditional industry where the pace of change has typically been slow and deliberate, the past few years in foodservice have seemed like a whirlwind. The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated the industry’s learning curve on long-developing trends such as takeout, delivery and noncontact ordering and payment systems. In the years since, automation and artificial intelligence have begun boosting efficiency in the front and back of the house, helping operators combat an ever-worsening labor crunch. Kitchens may have modernized as much in the past five years as in the previous 15 — or in some cases, 50.

Changes in consumer usage patterns and operators’ imperatives alike have implications for kitchen designers, consultants, dealers, manufacturers — essentially every business that touches the foodservice industry. Here, industry veterans identify some key transitions in play.

More Food Going Out the Door

“Diners’ tastes have changed, and so have the ways people get food and where they eat it,” says Garin Wong, vice president, consulting services at New York-based elite | studio e. “People order food online, from a phone app or at a kiosk, and a lot of them prefer not having to talk to an employee. So operators don’t need to pay a cashier, and can assign that person to work on the line to make food or to box, bag, assemble it and get it out.”

Faster processing of food orders for off-premises consumption means significant changes in the organization of restaurants and other foodservice operations, both in the front and back of the house, Wong says. “There needs to be more space for a host stand as well as pickup spaces or cubbies so that customers and delivery drivers can come in the door for pickup and turn right around,” he explains.

Not only has takeout expanded generally, but in the limited-service sector, the role of drive-thru continues to grow, says Mark Rossi, founder and CEO of California-based Avanti Restaurant Solutions, an equipment dealer with a design division. Avanti’s business works closely with numerous chains in expansion mode.

Fast-food chains that have long depended on drive-thru for the bulk of sales are multiplying the number of lanes and automating order-taking (though McDonald’s recently ended a test of artificial intelligence-assisted ordering). Even chains that did not previously offer drive-thru service, such as full-service concept Applebee’s, are now testing or adding drive-thru.

Business for full-service restaurants post-pandemic is “still picking up, but all the incremental business is to-go,” Rossi says. That means restaurants need “more staging area, and in some cases a place for third-party delivery guys to pick up orders,” he says.

As a result, in both limited-service and full-service sectors, the pressure for greater and faster throughput is intense. But another trend — the rise of mobile and online preorders — gives restaurants data and therefore additional power, Rossi points out. “I don’t know exactly how artificial intelligence is going to affect everything, but it can be used to modulate order times, figure out when peak demand is and what’s the proper menu mix, and inform operators on what they need to make their production better, more efficient and faster,” he says. On the other hand, he cautions, “With all the ordering ahead of time, we now have more lead time to finish them, but there are still lines of people coming in the door — maybe 35% of customers — so ticket times, throughput, getting all the orders ready to go at the right time, all remain important.”

With Less Labor Available, Consumers Take Charge

It’s not news to anyone in the foodservice industry that it’s harder nowadays to hire and retain labor. And the employees who operators do manage to hire demand higher pay and better benefits, raising the labor portion of input costs.

Fortunately, most consumers seem to be fine with the do-it-yourself approach and less employee contact. “Hand in hand with new technology, we are seeing a larger volume of self-checkout options for our sports segment,” says Ryan Rongo, FCSI, vice president of design at Chicago-based S2O Consultants, which has worked on a number of stadiums and arenas. “There’s a trend away from concessions and more toward frictionless self-checkout markets like Amazon Go.”

Contact between customers and staff still occurs, but Rongo explains, it takes different forms now. “We have introduced more action stations to show the visual element of food preparation, but a lot of prep is still done in the main kitchen or commissary, with the food transported to be finished in front of guests before it’s packaged and sent into a heated self-serve slide.” As for beverages, he notes, precise high-tech soda and beer guns now allow for rapid fills and a faster pace of customers picking up their drinks as they walk through a serving area.

“Operators are taking a look, asking themselves why they need to pay a cashier $20 an hour when nobody comes up to the cashier station anymore,” Wong says. “They can save labor operationally, assigning a person to a cashier station just to check them out of a large servery. Or they can put them to work on the line to make food, wrap and box and bag it.”

In full-service restaurants, “We’re seeing a lot of robot bussers, runners and servers now,” Wong notes. Operators use these robotic systems in conjunction with tableside tablets that diners use to place their orders, he says. A host escorts guests to their tables and explains the ordering system to those who are new to the concept and may even help them place the order. Then, “five minutes later, a robot wheels over with drinks that they can grab off the tray. The robots have sensors so they know where the right table is. It’s simple, and both customers and workers are getting used to it.” Wong points out, however, that serving adult beverages requires ID checks, so human servers still have to deliver them — for now.

How the Back of the House Has Changed

The drive for greater throughput — more food out the door faster — has led some operators to rethink their cooking processes. “Restaurants are changing and customizing menus to fit the quicker pace and what labor can produce today,” Wong says. “A menu that was based on prep and three cooks to make it is now a menu that two cooks, or one and a half cooks, can produce. You can use the same cookline, but with less work for people.”

For example, Wong says, “Restaurants are not cooking full steaks or roast chicken but operating more like a short-order cookline. The layout of the equipment and the selection of workstations have changed. There may not be enough space to produce the higher to-go volume, so operators are adding new multitasking equipment like a small, ventless combi or a high-speed, multimode oven or small countertop electrical equipment.”

Rossi sees it similarly. “People who were once making food ready to order now have to look at ways to cook faster or differently,” he says. “In a combi oven, you can cook food to a certain temperature and doneness and hold it in the safe temperature zone as orders come in, then finish and serve it. That effectively cuts ticket times in half. It means you’re cooking larger batches, so you might see more combis, kettles, blast chillers.”

Jeremy Kittelson, a principal at Colorado-based Ricca Design Studios, also sees vast changes in commercial kitchens. “There’s a lot of demand for pieces of equipment that can do multiple things,” he says. Rapid-cook ovens, sophisticated combi ovens, tilt skillets that also function as fryers or pressure cookers, all are in high demand he says, along with requests for induction cooktops.

Another imperative is equipment that requires less in the way of trained labor, Kittelson says. “For the first time, we’re talking about the advantages of rotating pizza ovens. It used to be that you had to have a solid-fuel-burning Neapolitan-style oven, but operators don’t even have enough people coming into the kitchen anymore, much less those with the skill to feed the fire and make sure it’s always at the right temperature.”

Back-of-the-house automation and robotics continue to be tested, primarily in limited-service settings, Rossi says. Operators are starting to look at automation from a specification perspective, identifying discrete areas where automating a task can bring good ROI. “Labor is driving automation in certain chains that are already doing things like robotic arms on fryers,” he says. “They’re all testing these to figure out whether they can keep up production and how long the equipment will take to pay off.”

Rossi points to Chipotle’s test of a machine that peels avocados and prepares guacamole, and more recently a partnership with a manufacturer on a system that dispenses proteins, beans, rice and lettuce for salads and burrito bowls, with the bowl embedded in the counter. “Now they’ve totally solved the solution for all their to-go bowl orders, which represent a pretty high percentage of their business,” he says.

Salads are a “perfect scenario for food to be produced with automation,” Rossi adds. Sweetgreen, for instance, continues to build out its Infinite Kitchen stores where a robotic salad assembly system dispenses ingredients from chutes. “The only thing the worker at the end of the line has to do is maybe put salmon on top of the salad,” he says. With customers placing orders on digital tablets, the entire transaction is now automated.

Wong, too, anticipates more robotic assistance in commercial kitchens. “I’ve cooked burger patties and fries; sometimes you need someone to look at the product to see if it needs another 10 seconds or should be removed 3 seconds early, so it won’t be burnt. Before, the automatic machines weren’t measuring temperature, just cooking time. But now they’ve gotten pretty good at measuring temperature. So now, you can replace the person doing fries, and a burger-making robot only needs a person to load the patties.”

“We will have full robotic assembly lines,” Rongo predicts. One example of things to come: “We are putting robotic pizza assembly in some large setups. You insert the pizza crust, the machine applies toppings and sauces, then puts the pizza into a tray to distribute to some of the concessions, where it’s baked and served to guests.” But it will be several more years before robotic assembly is adopted widely, he believes, and it may never make sense to operations that aren’t high-volume.

Automation is also coming to the least glamorous aspects of commercial kitchens to decrease labor costs, says Kittelson: “The big push in warewashing is stations that automate the process as much as possible, whether it’s scrapping systems or rinsing tanks that circulate water to reduce scrubbing.”

Today’s biggest kitchen priority, Kittelson says, is to “specify equipment that allows you to do more with less. But balancing upfront capital cost versus long-term savings is still a challenge. For instance, you can specify a great scrapping system that will take a little extra room and cost a little more, but in the long run it will mean one less full-time employee. Often, the ROI has not been completely evaluated at the time equipment is being specified. Lower-price-point restaurants are having a hard time staying competitive. Manufacturers need to solve the problem of units that right now are prohibitively expensive. They need to solve repair, maintenance and storage strategies and how to power these units. But I do believe all that is coming. Ultimately, rising hourly labor rates are going to force change.”

The Rules Get More Complicated

Those designing commercial kitchens and specifying equipment must know their way around a confusing tangle of local and national codes. But with equipment, technology and building infrastructure changing so quickly, keeping up is harder than ever before.

Local Health Codes and Sanitation

Equipment and practices for today’s higher-throughput, faster-paced kitchens are sometimes viewed with suspicion by local health departments, says Mark Rossi, CEO and founder of Avanti Restaurant Solutions. “Equipment like thawing cabinets, which hold products at a certain temperature before serving, have health departments getting jumpy because they don’t understand how that all works,” he says. “A lot of health departments frown on sous vide cooking because they think operators are holding something longer than it’s safe.” The solution? Rossi says new training opportunities for health inspectors are necessary to help them understand the latest cooking techniques and other developments in commercial foodservice equipment. For operators, careful documentation that the kitchen meets HACCP standards will be more important than ever. In the longer run, he believes, local health codes will be updated to reflect new realities.

“Health codes have not changed dramatically, but there definitely has been more attention paid to sanitation practices,” says Jeremy Kittelson, principal of Ricca Design Studios. “There’s a focus around warewashing systems, which are the most important HACCP control points. So, specifiers need to make sure whether high temperature or chemical sanitation is best and really understand what the code requires for that specific operation.”

Some equipment and technological advances relate directly to sanitation, Kittelson points out. “You used to have a clipboard next to the ice baths to document HACCP compliance,” he says. “Now, blast chillers and combi ovens all have the ability to properly track and document food safety practices.” When specifying jobs, he points out to the client that the latest cooking and chilling equipment is an investment that brings “huge benefits” in terms of both food safety and food quality, making high upfront costs worthwhile.

Other food safety advances Kittelson mentions include touchless hand sinks with the proper guards (although he cautions that it’s also important to place them in the right locations) and easy cleaning systems for cooking equipment. What once required an employee hauling jugs of cleaner back and forth now may only require dropping a cleaning tablet into the unit, he marvels.

Ventilation

Kittelson also mentions ventilation as another issue that preoccupies local inspectors. And ventless hoods are going into more kitchens, he notes, since they can save operators from the need to install a conventional hood. “If health inspectors see you cooking bacon under a ventless hood, they will ask questions,” he says. “Installing ventless equipment doesn’t mean you don’t have to coordinate with the mechanical engineer on the project to provide makeup air. You have to be up with the codes and extremely proactive.”

Refrigerants

“You see a lot of requirements coming out of California, and their refrigeration requirements are much more stringent than in the past,” says Ryan Rongo, FCSI, vice president of design, S2O Consultants. “And we’re expecting new U.S. Department of Energy requirements in the near future, which will have an even bigger impact.”

Rongo says he and his team meet with local partners and refrigeration manufacturers to hear about new refrigerants and systems under development. “We’ve started looking at designs for projects opening two or three years from now,” he says. His team learned the hard way to think far ahead: “We had to redesign the entire refrigeration system in one of our projects to accommodate new code changes that we weren’t aware of in the initial design phase.”

Water and Wastewater

“We and the architects we work for have seen that health departments have gotten stricter in the past two or three years in the way they interpret codes that haven’t changed in a long time,” says James Petersen Jr., FCSI (PP), DFS, president of Michigan-based C.i.i. Food Service Design. “One inspector told us we had to run a condensate drain from the walk-in 30 feet away outside the building. We had to come up with changes to react to what he was saying without saying no.” Petersen explains that he tries to avoid installing new floor drains in existing buildings because tearing up a floor is quite expensive. In some cases, putting equipment on casters to allow it to be wheeled over to an existing floor drain “can make it work, but it takes a flexible attitude,” he says.

Another issue that Petersen says “is giving my clients and architects headaches” is hot water generation. Current regulations may require a hot water system for the kitchen that is separate from the main water heater for the rest of the building. “When local inspectors calculate hot water generation, they assume that every fixture will be turned on at the same time,” he says.

And C.i.i. Food Service Design, which does a lot of work in K-12 education, was “smacked upside the head,” Petersen says, by a new federal requirement that water being used for food preparation, as well as in ice makers and beverage systems, in school kitchens must now go through a treatment filter.

Using dry food wells rather than steam wells represents one way of conserving water, Rossi notes. In addition, “A regenerative dipper well faucet will use water that has been heated and recirculated, rather than water being dumped into the sewer X number of times,” he says.

Meeting water usage requirements may mean installing aerators and faucets that restrict flow rates, says Garin Wong, vice president of consulting services of elite | studio e. “They cost a little more money to engineer, but they meet Energy Star standards,” he notes. As for wastewater, local inspectors are “getting strict on grease,” he says. “We’re working on a project in Miami that requires two local grease traps on the same floor, with regular sampling and cleanout.”

Energy and Electrification

A number of cities and jurisdictions around the country have proposed bans on using natural gas in new construction. Electrification will clearly be a major factor in the future. “It’s one of the biggest local code issues, and it affects specs,” Wong says. “Across the country, installers of kitchens for operators looking more to electric equipment may install a transformer running on 480 volts to use less amperage.” Wong reports that inspectors in New York City and other jurisdictions have been focusing on makeup air systems and demand control ventilation — which uses less energy because it doesn’t require a high-speed fan spinning all day — as well as energy-saving features in walk-ins, like strip curtain barriers and higher R-value insulation.

“The biggest implication of electrification is the tax on the grid,” says Rossi. The electrical load of a commercial kitchen can be reduced significantly by monitoring systems. These systems include kitchen management systems that communicate with the different pieces of equipment and control systems that adjust for peak and off-peak requirements and “power down the fryer, griddle or hood to a certain level at off-peak, then ramp back up for peak times,” he says.

But Rossi believes there’s also a longer-term solution for fulfilling a foodservice kitchen’s growing electrical demand: “Batteries. I would say in the next decade, but not in the next year.”