“Our Kitchen of the Future is another initiative that can help us propel forward. It involves two pieces of equipment that allow our team members to make food more quickly, more consistently, more easily, and with less training. Guests are telling us our food is better and the ticket times are shorter.”


— Kevin Hochman CEO


Brinker International


expect economic conditions to improve in six months. Further, April experienced the weakest year-over- year sales growth (1.3 percent) since July 2022, according to Black Box Intelligence, a restaurant industry data and insights provider. One of the factors holding


back restaurants is the dearth of available employees. As of the end of April, the accommodation and foodservices industry had 1.14 million job openings, an improvement from 1.35 million the year before but still well above the 903,000 openings seen in April 2019. The industry has steadily been filling positions, averaging 52,050 new employees a month for the past year, and has nearly regained all the jobs lost to COVID, but operators are still struggling to meet their staffing needs as the industry expands. The 2023 State of the Restaurant Industry Report projects the industry workforce will grow by 500,000 jobs this year, and will continue adding another 150,000 jobs annually through 2030, meaning that competition for workers will only become fiercer.


Keeping It Simple


Although it operates two of the most well-known brand names in foodservice, Brinker is not immune to those outside forces. For the past year, Hochman has focused on team member retention and recruitment and identifying ways to make restaurants operate more efficiently through simplification, an improved


12 FEDA News & Views


labor model and better equipment and technology. Fortunately, Brinker and Hochman are finding a lot of overlap in the answers — which will also deliver a better guest experience. Hochman’s listening tour


revealed many opportunities for Chili’s and Maggiano’s restaurants to streamline and simplify, and much of it boils down to equipment and menu options. Every hour of daily prep in the kitchen, from roasting peppers to preparing sauces, was costing Brinker 46 years of labor across all its restaurants, so Hochman knew the company needed to get faster in the kitchen. To help it shorten cooking times for popular dishes such as steaks and fajitas, the company rolled out a test of its Kitchen of the Future program to 67 restaurants. The program outfits kitchens with equipment such as high-tech ovens and clamshell griddles that can simultaneously cook both sides of protein, reducing cooking times for a medium-well burger from 5 to 2 minutes and 5 seconds. The equipment has likewise trimmed the fat for cooking a medium-done sirloin steak from nearly 9 minutes and 30 seconds to 2 minutes and 55 seconds while delivering a more even and consistent dish. Hochman has estimated Chili’s could save upward of $5 million annually by reducing the number of improperly cooked steaks sent back by diners. “Our Kitchen of the Future is another initiative that can help us


propel forward,” Hochman says. “It involves two pieces of equipment that allow our team members to make food more quickly, more consistently, more easily, and with less training. Guests are telling us our food is better and the ticket times are shorter. We’re excited about the Kitchen of the Future based on the results so far but have not yet decided if we will move forward with a full rollout.” Hochman’s vision is to promote the things that make a true operational and financial difference for restaurants and their team members — and to eliminate those that don’t. That’s why it’s testing equipment and decommissioned Rita the Robot. Rita was a front-of-the-house


robot that seated guests and ran food to tables. It was being tested in 61 Chili’s restaurants and seemed to be a hit with guests, who enjoyed the novelty of watching an autonomous robot work and the way Rita sang the Chili’s Happy Birthday song, but the technology just never met operational expectations. “Rita was really too slow to help the restaurant team with the tasks given — running food out to tables and bringing dishes to the dishwasher,” Hochman explains. “It still involved humans to constantly program, it still involved humans to load and unload the robot and it was unfortunately very slow in the dining room.” Following two years of


experimentation, Hochman pulled


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