When starting or refurbishing any form of business the planning and attention to detail are the most important elements. If you have a good plan that is itemised with short and concise methodical goals then you can achieve more or less anything. Planning restaurant is generally split into four main areas, the kitchen, front of house, marketing and financial planning. This article looks at planning a restaurant kitchen focussing on restaurant kitchen equipment.

The market for restaurant kitchen equipment is a densely populated one and traps that first time restaurateurs fall into is buying restaurant kitchen equipment that they do not need or is not suitable for the volumes they will be expecting. A perfect example of this is with kitchen fabrication. The surfaces in a kitchen should reflect the volume of food production expected allowing for your essential appliances and separate food preparing areas.

When installing restaurant kitchen equipment the major concern is that of hygiene and health and safety protocol. The fabrication can be designed so that meat, fish and vegetables can be prepped not only on colour coded cutting boards but in different areas of the kitchen. The local councils are so pro-active about enforcing environmental health legislation that chances cannot be taken, the key is in planning the fabrication to reflect your food production process.

Another key point when planning the fabrication is to leave the main gas, plumbing and electrical outlets free as you are going to want your restaurant kitchen appliances to be fitted there. When selecting which commercial kitchen appliances you need you again have to take into account your space and projected volume of production. There is no point investing 5000GBP in a bratt pan if your volumes do not require that sort of production.

For every item of restaurant kitchen equipment there is a return of investment on that item. Each appliance serves a purpose specific to the production of your menu and the volumes of that menu are dependent on your projected heads per week. Using the bratt pan example; this might mean that you can halve the cost of your bratt pan as you will not need that high a specification of restaurant kitchen equipment due to your volumes not supporting a return of investment.

Restaurant kitchen equipment can always be upgraded to cope with increasing volumes in production so it is better to calculate your production volumes per head and be conservative to secure your return on investment as opposed to blowing start up money on unnecessary restaurant kitchen equipment purely for scope to expand.