Food delivery is a constantly expanding reality, which, in recent years, has undergone a real user boom and its success shows no sign of diminishing. The number of people who are requesting ready-to-eat food delivery directly from their homes is always increasing. The number of orders is so great that the restaurant world cannot fail to respond to this evolution in customer habits and it needs to adapt its proposals and business to offer services aimed specifically at this particular category of customers.
To make this happen, however, it is necessary to acquire specific technological equipment and adopt new ways of working, which take into account the specifics of this type of service and the ever-increasing level of quality required by customers who order food at home. Dark kitchens, which are kitchens where food is only prepared to be delivered at home through special delivery services, are going in this direction with ever-increasing diffusion.
The characteristics of a dark kitchen
A kitchen which is dedicated exclusively to the preparation of take-away food has characteristics that are slightly different from those of a traditional restaurant kitchen. In order for a dark kitchen to be truly efficient, it must be able to guarantee:
- Speed: the platforms that manage delivery services focus a lot on the speed of delivery and customers increasingly demand fast delivery times. For this reason, cooks who work in dark kitchens must be able to prepare their dishes quickly. Speed has always been an important factor in a restaurant kitchen, but in dark kitchens it is absolutely essential. Short delivery times is a fundamental factor in increasing customer satisfaction and retaining customers in the long run.
- Reduced spaced requirements: to provide customers with quick and satisfactory service, it is extremely advantageous to set up dark kitchens in historic centers or in key points of the city. Positioning kitchens in strategic places is essential to get closer to potential customers and, therefore, reduce delivery times. This requires, however, making a sizable investment, since often the most appealing spaces from a location point of view are in great demand and therefore expensive. In addition, opening a new business in a historic center are subject to particular constraints. A competitive dark kitchen, therefore, must have extremely small dimensions, in order to save on the costs of purchasing or renting the location. They need to be able to be set up even in environments that would normally not be suitable for hosting a traditional type kitchen.
- Quality: as we already explained, customers who use food delivery services are increasingly demanding and expect to receive food in their homes that don’t make them miss dishes that are normally served in a restaurant. For this reason, focusing on quality is essential to ensure the success of a dark kitchen. It doesn't matter what type of food is offered to customers, as it can range from pizza, to ethnic food, to hamburgers, to sushi, but it is important that every dish that arrives in the hands of customers has the same characteristics that it had when it was prepared in the kitchen.
How to choose the perfect oven for a dark kitchen
As we have seen, organizing a dark kitchen and making it truly competitive is far from simple task. To do this, you need to have professional equipment and, in particular, a high-performance oven that is capable of responding to all the needs of the kitchen:
- Speed: The oven must be able to cook food in a few minutes and to reach very high temperatures in order to ensure that the dish, once its taken out of the oven, still arrives hot in the hands of the customer.
- Reduced space: The perfect oven for a dark kitchen is a small-sized oven, which allows you to minimize the footprint in terms of square meters and which does not need drains, hoods, flues and so on. In this way, it is possible to transform any type of environment into a dark kitchen, as it is not necessary to perform particular electrical or plumbing interventions or present documentation or request specific permits.
- Quality: The oven in a dark kitchen must guarantee finished product quality. For this to be possible, it must be easy to program, reliable and precise. In addition, it must be able to carry out different cooking processes simultaneously, without affecting the quality of the final result.
Lainox has developed the perfect oven to meet all three of these needs with its Oracle oven, a high-speed oven that allows you to produce perfect dishes in just a few minutes. Thanks to its power and its many functions, it is able to respond to any cooking need at it reaches very high temperatures which allows food to arrive in the customer's hands still hot. Moreover, it has been designed to be completely plug and play. To work, it needs only to be connected to an electricity grid, without the need for drains, flues, or extractor hoods (which have been replaced by a special odor filtering system)
This makes it the ideal oven for a dark kitchen and a fundamental ally for those who want to set up a professional kitchen in a small space, while at the same time, offer high quality dishes to their customers.
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