Operations

How to take stress off the kitchen without sacrificing quality

Photograph: Shutterstock

Bacon is a perennial customer favorite and therefore an essential item on many restaurant menus. In fact, according to MenuMonitor, 81% of restaurants have it on their menus. However, it can also present serious challenges for restaurants. From the time it takes to cook, to the grease disposal, to cleaning up the griddles, cooking bacon from raw is undeniably labor intensive.

Taking bacon off the menu, of course, is not an option. If anything, bacon has become even more prevalent on menus, adding flavor to everything from salads to sandwiches and even desserts. Rather, the solution is finding the best, most efficient way to cook bacon that satisfies diners’ cravings, while simplifying the execution in the kitchen.

One option is finding a “speed-scratch” bacon that cuts complexity but still delivers the flavor and quality of a bacon cooked from raw. HORMEL® BACON 1™ Perfectly Cooked Bacon from Hormel Foodservice is that product. Hormel Foods uses a proprietary cooking process that took years to perfect. This process results in fully cooked bacon that looks, tastes and performs like bacon cooked from raw, but only requires a small fraction of the effort to prepare.

Using a product like this will not only cut hours of labor and oven time, it also dramatically reduces the amount of bacon grease disposal and sheet pans that require washing. In fact, HORMEL® BACON 1™ Perfectly Cooked Bacon cooks in half the time, produces 90% less grease, and uses 50% less sheet pans compared to cooking raw bacon with the same finished slice thickness.

In the past, the only way to reduce or eliminate the prep work associated with cooking bacon from raw was to switch to a pre-cooked bacon. But there was a noticeable quality gap between pre-cooked bacon and bacon cooked from raw. HORMEL® BACON 1™ Perfectly Cooked Bacon was designed to bridge that gap, providing foodservice operators with a better way to serve great bacon – one that didn’t require so much time, effort and equipment to prepare. 

The labor market is already challenging for restaurants. It’s essential to use staff efficiently and reduce turnover as much as possible. Finding qualified, reliable workers can be tough, and making their jobs easier and more efficient can help with turnover—reducing hiring and training costs in the long run.

By using easy-to-execute ingredients like HORMEL® BACON 1™ Perfectly Cooked Bacon, kitchen staff can focus their time on other tasks to create delicious menu items all day long, instead of spending hours on bacon prep.

Every foodservice operator should be able to serve great bacon, regardless of kitchen size, staffing challenges or skill level. Operators shouldn’t have to choose between quality and simplicity. HORMEL® BACON 1™ Perfectly Cooked Bacon was created to address the challenges of foodservice kitchens and exceed the expectations of discerning diners.

This post is sponsored by Hormel Foodservice

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