How does your restaurant document, organize, and secure its recipes? There are the good old fashioned flip cards, binders, and laminated sheets. For those who like to live on the edge, how about post-it notes, or old scraps of paper strewn about the kitchen?
You DO have recipe documents, right? (Please tell us you have recipe documents.)
Hopefully it goes without saying that all of the methods mentioned above have inherent weaknesses. A simple guest of wind from an air conditioner or open door can blow your recipes to kingdom come. How easy would it be for a coveted recipe to fall into the hands of a careless staff member, a former cook with a vendetta, or worst of all, a competitor?
If only there were a product out there that could house all your recipes in one secure place and distribute them where you need them to be.
If only.
Aha! Lucky for you, Custom Business Solutions (CBS) has created just the thing you need: Recipe Viewer. Restaurants such as Golden Corral, BJ’s, and Lazy Dog Restaurant and Bar are all using and benefitting from Recipe Viewer.
What is Recipe Viewer?
Recipe Viewer is a digital recipe distribution system that allows you to automate your kitchen’s recipe management system. CBS has launched Recipe Viewer in many restaurants to help each of them solve a number of common issues found with the traditional (often costly) way of distributing recipes.
What are the benefits of using Recipe Viewer?
Here are just a few of the solutions Recipe Viewer provides:
- The recipes are easily updated and always current across all locations
- Recipe Viewer reduces the cost and waste of paper recipe distribution
- The food is prepared consistently by different cooks and across all locations.
- Recipes are secured and not able to “walk off” or fall into the wrong hands
- You can automate your training of new staff members and cooks with videos, pictures and text recipes in each working space
How does Recipe Viewer work?
The system works via a centralized database with touch screen terminals in each kitchen. The central database is either hosted on the corporate headquarters for the restaurant or hosted in the cloud. The database contains all the images, recipes, videos, and notes that each menu item needs to be consistent and delicious. These all have the ability to be pushed online to one location, a few select locations, or all locations.
In each kitchen, the cooks can access recipes in several different ways. First, there is a convenient search function that eliminates the need to flip through pages upon pages of recipes. It provides pictures and videos to help the cooks deliver consistent dishes each time. It also works seamlessly with the QSR Automations bump pad to help make every kitchen even more efficient. Recipe Viewer is also able to display recipes in multiple languages to cater to those who are more comfortable working with languages other than English.
What kind of hardware is needed to launch Recipe Viewer?
We have found great success with IBM Anyplace Kiosk devices. We have also had several customers deploy their own hardware. Products from HP, Elo Touch screens, and Apple iPads have been put into the field with varied levels of success.
On the administrative end, the tool is easy to use, easy to train, and easy to deploy. The administrator view has functionality to upload the videos and pictures, and to modify the text and category for each recipe. You can also search recipes by component, which can be incredibly valuable when food prices fluctuate or certain foods should be avoided due to customer allergies or recall. For example, over the years there have been a few nationwide spinach scares due to E. Coli. Customers were able to easily identify each recipe that contained spinach and substitute it for another item.
Interested in securing your recipes with Recipe Viewer?
