No matter where your restaurant is located, it’s likely that your facility suffers from a lack of storage space. After all, you need your space to be dedicated to food preparation and seating for customers, not storing supplies that you might or might not need. That’s why it’s important to make smart use of your available space so that you can store what you need without having to buy a larger facility.
Move Up
While the floor of your restaurant’s facility might not have much space, the area near the ceiling likely has plenty of available space. By using shelving and cabinets that are mounted close to the ceiling, you can vastly increase your storage space without needing to increase your square footage. Just be sure not to cover any HVAC vents or sprinkler heads when installing your storage solutions.
Store Off-Site
Having an on-site freezer, especially a walk-in freezer, can take up valuable real estate that doesn’t provide much of a return on investment. That’s why cold storage facilities make so much sense. By storing a majority of your cold food off-site, you can take advantage of bulk food discounts without needing extra on-site storage to keep the extra food fresh.
Stack To The Max
As a high-volume restaurant, it’s likely that you have several large food preparation vessels lying around your kitchen. Fortunately, these vessels can do more than simply take up space. By stacking smaller dishes inside these larger dishes, you can double, triple, or even quadruple your available storage space with no cost and almost no effort. Just be sure to place in groups dishes that are often used together so that you can access what you need quickly.
Store In Plain Sight
Since your restaurant’s seating area likely occupies a majority of your restaurant’s square footage, it makes sense to utilize this space for storage. However, it’s not very visually appealing to have stacks of supplies sitting around where customers can see them. However, if you display certain supplies in clever ways, you can hide extra supplies in plain sight without ever causing a problem. For example, you may display extra sacks of flour to provide a farm-to-table vibe to your restaurant and then delight your customers as you use these sacks of flour throughout the evening.
A big part of smart storage is simply planning carefully what you’ll need on a given day. By analyzing your supply-use patterns, you’ll be able to make smarter decisions about what you order so that you don’t end up with too much. In addition to solving your storage problems, this approach will help you save a resource that’s even more precious than space: money.
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