Chapter 17 - Restaurant Standards

What are “standards”? Types of standards | Use of standards | Setting standards for your operation | Flexibility of standards | Standard setting and leadership

Not so long ago a management consulting firm was called in to examine a large restaurant company and to make recommendations. One of the recommendations presented to the company was that a separate department should be established with the department head to be called the Director of Standards. The owners and management of the business were puzzled. What would a Director of Standards do? What kind of standards were to be included in the man's job? They were only reflecting the restaurant business as a whole. "Standards" as such were a new idea to them and to most restaurant operators.

Heavy industry with its professional industrial engineers has been talking and thinking "standards" for many years, going back to the turn of the century in some progressive companies. Restaurant chains, though big enough to hire standards men, have only recently talked standards as something separate from food purchasing, food produc­tion, and food service. What is meant by standards? If you were to hire a Director of Standards, what would he do? As a small operator, what do you do to set up and follow standards?

Standards are measures against which something is compared. In a well operated restaurant they are measures of what is bought and sold, how it is prepared, of the sanitation and appearance of the restaurant, and of the appearance and performance of the management and per­sonnel. Standards are criteria of what is desirable in product, person­nel, and service. All restaurants have standards, some vague, some clearly stated; some only in the minds of the managers, some written and distributed to all employees. Everyone has standards. How clear are yours, how well stated, how well known by the people who work with them?

Here are examples of standards.

Food Standards
Example: Buy hamburger ground from U. S. commercial grade chuck. Use eighteen percent cod fat.

Purchasing Standards
Example: The re-order point for catsup is two cases of #10 cans. Do not order more than five cases.

Receiving Standards
Example: Weigh all fish and chicken with the ice removed.

Storage Standards
Example: Store all new items behind old items and use the old items first.

Preparation Standards
Example: Temperature for frying shoestrings and shrimp  345 degrees
Temperature for frying chicken                   315 degrees

Portion Control
Example: A ten cent ice cream cone should contain 3.5 ounces of ice cream, no more, no less.

Personal Standards
Example: All lady employees in the restaurant are required by state law to wear hair nets while at work.

Service Standards
Example: Each customer is entitled to the same courtesy and treat­ment regardless of his or her station in life.

Selection Standards
Example: Preference for car hostesses will be given to married girls with small children, between 5' and 5'5" in height, not over 130 pounds, and having their own transportation.

Sanitation Standards
Example: Check all glasses and dishes for appearance and chips be­fore using them.

Cash Control Standards
Example: At closing, each cash register will retain a bank of $25 for change. All other money and checks are deposited in the night deposit box at Williams Bank and a duplicate deposit slip sent to the home office.

Production Standards

From a cost viewpoint, production standards are the most impor­tant of all. These are the expectations of work to be accomplished using the personnel, equipment, and layout at hand. Necessarily, pro­duction standards must be set for a particular work situation. As better methods, equipment, and training are introduced, production stand­ards change.

Making sandwiches by the assembly line method, for example, re­quires only 6/10 of a worker minute. Sandwich making by an individ­ual requires at least twice as long per sandwich. It takes several minutes to make a pie when made by an individual. Using an assembly line, pumpkin pies were produced in one kitchen at the rate of one a minute.

Production standards can be expressed in any meaningful unit. Meals produced per man hour is one way. Following are statistics from the American Dietetic Association:

TYPE INSTITUTION	MEALS PRODUCED PER MAN HOUR OF LABOR USED
Hotels	1.25 -   1.50
Restaurants	1.50 -   1.87
Cafeterias	3.60 -   8.75
School Lunch	5.45 - 15.00
College Dormitories	3.38 -   9.07
Hospitals	4.76
Hospitals	6.00

Here are some production figures found by the writers in terms of meals produced in an eight hour working day:

School Lunch—100 meals produced by each kitchen employee
Industrial Food Service Cafeteria—90 meals produced by each kitchen employee
Commercial Cafeterias—60 meals produced by each kitchen employee

Set Standards for Yourself

Management would be an easy job if all that were needed were to set up standards and to see to it that people followed them. This can be done in a concentration camp with plenty of guns, whips, and elec­trified fences. But not in a restaurant. Leadership is an essential ingredient of management. All eyes are on the manager. Employees imi­tate the manager. He leads by living up to high standards.

As has been said, "The speed of the boss is the speed of the gang." Don't expect others to knock themselves out for the Corner Drive-in if the boss is taking it easy. A good way to insure employees being on time for work is for you to be there early. All eyes are on the boss. What he does, his attitudes, and his disposition are reflected among the employees. To expect high morals among employees, practice high morals yourself. A snappy appearance in the boss is apt to be seen also in employees. And so it goes. The boss sets the pace for standards.

Standards are applied to things done by employees in a restaurant. When these standards are applied to a manager, they are usually ex­pressed more broadly and fall into the category of policy. For example, a chain of restaurants may expect its units not to exceed a 3 8 % food cost. This is a policy. Every multi-plant operation should have both a standards of practice manual for supervisors and a policy manual for managers. Standards are set up to implement policies.

Standards are easy to talk about, more difficult to establish, and a problem to enforce. Here are some guides in setting standards.

I recently witnessed the development of a cycle menu over a period of months. Outside consultants started the ball rolling and manage­ment kept it going—but with poor results. Only after several hours of consultation with the chefs who used the menus was success achieved.

New standards are reluctantly accepted by persons already on the job. They are more readily accepted by new employees because they have nothing to unlearn, no old habits to give up. It's easy to get new waitresses to wear stockings and hair nets; a major operation in some cases with employees who have worked without them.

Changing the work pattern of any person is best accomplished by consulting them first.

Some Standards are Flexible; Others Inflexible

Some standards are necessarily flexible. Sanitation is always a rela­tive standard. A restaurant is never completely clean, yet the violation of some sanitation standards is immoral, dangerous, and could even lead to loss of life. In a South American restaurant I visited, the dishes, utensils, and glasses looked fairly clean. On visiting the kitchen I learned that the dish machine, a good modern one, had no hot water. This was in a community where disease was rampant. Dishwashing standards are of the most difficult to maintain, but should be fought for if necessary.

Progressive.management seeks to improve its standards. Cold water glass washing using an iodine compound may well supersede the old hand-brushing of glasses and the glass washing machine itself. A small cold water glass washing machine placed at the point of use can save thousands of steps in transporting glasses from counter to dish room. As more is learned about our business, standards are changed to reflect that learning.

Standard Setting Is Part of Leadership

Studies have shown that the best managers are those who are them­selves striving toward goals and who can get employees to accept these goals. Standards of production and service are goals. Trying to set realistic standards and getting an organization to live up to them is a soul-wearing, ego-smashing, everlasting job—one that can destroy a manager's faith in human nature if he fails to recognize that achieving standards is a major responsibility of management, one that never ends.

Setting standards makes life easier for employee and manager. Su­pervision by coercion is partly replaced by objectives to be reached by employees. Don't expect perfection. Expect that you, the manager, will have to initiate standards and continually work to get employees to accept them as goals.

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