Time is money, and no one understands that old adage more is better than an employer who pays employees by the hour. What if there was a way to reduce the amount of time dishroom operators have to spend pre-soaking and scraping dishes before loading them into the dishmachine, and instead gives them more time to do other productive tasks around the kitchen? The Automatic Soil Removal (ASR) technology on select Hobart commercial dishwashers reduces time spent prescrapping, leading to dishwashing labor savings by 20% or more.
How it Works
ASR, now available on the new AM16 Advansys™ door type dishmachine, as well as the CL conveyor type and FT1000e flight-type dishwashers, is a technology that filters out 80% of heavy food soils during the wash cycle, grabbing both large and small particles of food. More food soil can go into the machine, which means more dishes can be put into the dishwasher without as much pre-soaking and prescrapping. “We’re not having to handwash dishes or even spray them, which is a real labor savings for us,” says Monte Veatch, Food Service Director at Cedarville University in Cedarville, Ohio. “You really don’t have to scrap very much because the machine is designed to take care of that soil, so it’s a real bonus.” Because ASR helps keep wash water clean, it also reduces wash tank changes up to 50% throughout the day, saving more labor time on cleaning the machine.
Making the Most of Found Time in the Kitchen
Anyone who has worked in a dishroom knows the pain points operators face. From baked on pie filling to dried up eggs and cheese, food left on plates, bakeware, pots and pans can call for intense scrubbing in many cases. A quick once-over with a pre-rinse sprayer just doesn’t cut it on these tough food soils. ASR takes away the need for most of that manual labor. “I’ve found savings of up to 30 seconds per rack of dishes,” says Steve Dorn, kitchen manager at Harrison’s in Tipp City, Ohio. “When you add that time up over the course of a day or a week, it’s a pretty significant amount of time.”
Dorn says that the dishwashing crew is now able to perform light prep jobs, such as chopping vegetables or prepping baked potatoes, during the time they would have been prescrapping dishes. Other tasks to do instead of washing dishes might include serving customers, cleaning up around the kitchen, or helping out on the cookline. The time savings could even lead to less overtime, as other tasks get performed in the place of meticulous scraping. “Saving labor in the dishroom helped improve our bottom line,” Veatch says. “But we also reallocated to put more labor in the dining room to make a better customer experience.”
Watch this video and see for yourself how Hobart commercial dishwashers with ASR are making operations at Cedarville University more efficient.
