Eli5: how do fast food franchises keep their recipes a secret and food tasting the same at different locations?
In: Economics
and 3 Ring Binders.
Many years ago I worked as a Trainee Assistant Manager for a BBQ chicken place. I didn’t last very long, the 52 hour weeks got to me. Part of my duties were to read the entire shelf of 3 ring binders during my meal breaks. This included stuff like exactly what colour the chips were supposed to be, with colour photos to demonstrate. How long things were supposed to be cooked for. How often things were meant to be cleaned, How to go about safely filtering oil from the chip fryer to the chicken patty fryer and then the following day to the pineapple fritter fryer.
This is how fast food places ensure consistent product across all of their stores. By clearly documenting every aspect of how those stores are supposed to be run and how the product is to be produced.
To give you an example we used to salt chickens the day before they went into the ovens. The chickens are placed onto spit rods five at a time and there are six spit rods per oven. The amount of salt to be placed on the chickens is rigidly controlled. If we had any salt left over in the salt shaker after salting six spit rods worth of chickens then we got into trouble. Because we weren’t putting enough salt on the skin of the bird and the product wasn’t going to be consistent, sufficiently red, with the other stores.
To give you another example we once had a visit from the CEO of the company. He walked in and had one of our kitchen hands put a batch of chips into the fryer for the regulated 180 seconds. As they came out he took a look and announced that they were too light in colour. He directed the store manager to call the supplier and there was a rep at the store within 30 minutes to explain why their chips weren’t producing the desired result in the allocated time frame. Something to do with the amount of sugar in the potato’s varying throughout the year. We started cooking our chips for 185 seconds after that. The 3 ring binder was opened up and the colour card for the chips was waved around.
Essentially consistent produce is produced by about 10-15 great big thick 3 ring binder manuals of how to do just about everything inside the store,
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