5 Useful Tips on Food Hygiene in Your Kitchen

Recently, my buddy and I went for a mandatory course that all food handlers have to go through in my country. Basically, you're a food handler if you are a chef, sous chef, cook or kitchen assistant - as long as you play a role in the preparation of food for your customers.

I am so proud of myself for sitting through the 12-hour long course without falling asleep. I actually managed to learn a lot of stuff about food hygiene which I want to share with you too!

As promised, Open Cafeteria will document everything that I have learnt through the course of my own journey in setting up my very own cafeteria. This article is going to be about 5 good practices for food handling you can adopt in your kitchen or with your kitchen staff when you open your own cafeteria/ restaurant in future.

Food Hygiene Tip No. 1: Placement of Foods in Your Chillers 

The rule is that raw food must be placed on the bottom tiers of the chiller, while cooked food must be placed on the top tiers of the chillers.

Above is a typical under-counter chiller you will probably use in your restaurant's kitchen. If you have to put cooked food and raw food into the same chiller, you must follow this rule. Raw foods, especially meat, can have juices dripping onto other foods. These juices, more often than not, contain harmful bacteria which may cause cross-contamination (from one food to another). In the chiller, these juices might end up in the cooked food which are ready to be served if placed on the top tiers. 

Even if you are using containers to store your raw meats, you can never be too careful in terms of food hygiene, and I would adopt this practice and make it a good habit for my kitchen staff. Do not take these practices for granted because lives have been lost due to severe cases of food poisoning. It is our responsibility as cafe owners to ensure that our customers eat good and clean food.   

Food Hygiene Tip No. 2: FIFO (First-In, First Out) 

You might not have the same kind of storage system in your kitchen, but you get the idea. The FIFO principle is that food with an earlier expiry date should be placed in front of those with later ones in the storage areas. Enforce this and you will experience less wastage and of course, ensure that your customers do not consume expired products and get plagued by food borne illnesses. 

Check this link for a solution by EcoLab to make the expiry dates of your food products more visible to your staff using color coded labels! 

Food Hygiene Tip No. 3: The Proper Way of Sneezing in the Kitchen

There's hardly any way to stop yourself from having the sneeze of your life when it decides to come. So, how would you sneeze in the kitchen? Would you: 

1) Sneeze onto your apron? 

2) Sneeze onto a piece of tissue? 

3) Sneeze on the floor?

Let me explain why doing any of the above 3 options are all wrong. Firstly, your apron is meant to protect the food from your body's contamination. Sneezing onto your apron defeats the purpose of its very existence. Secondly, tissues should not be allowed in kitchens due to its flimsy nature which might cause contamination to the food prepared. Sneezing on the floor... It can go two ways: you clean it up immediately, distracting you from your work, or you leave it there for it to be a breeding ground of bacteria. 

The good news is that you do not have to go out of the kitchen to sneeze! Simply turn away from the food that you are preparing, and cover your mouth with your hands when you sneeze. You must wash your hands thoroughly with sanitizer before going back to handle your food though. 

Food Hygiene Tip No. 4: Veggie Samurais and Fruit Ninjas

Just look at how pretty these color-coded chopping boards are. Using these can help reduce the risk of cross-contamination during the course of food preparation: 

Red: Raw Meat

Blue: Raw Fish/ Seafood 

Yellow: Cooked Meats 

Green: Salads and Fruits

Brown: Vegetables

Grey: Baked/ Dairy Products 

The same rules apply for knives so start color coding your knives now! 

Food Hygiene Tip No. 5: Chipped/ Cracked Utensils

As cafe owners, we all want to keep our costs as low as possible. But there's a good reason why you should replace chipped or cracked utensils as soon as you spot them. Not only can they cause physical injuries to your customers if they eat out of a chipped bowl, these utensils can potentially harbor bacteria. 

That's all I have for now. Do hit me up at opencafeteria@gmail.com should you have any queries at all. Cheers and have a great week ahead! 

The 4 Most Underrated Marketing Strategies for Your Cafeteria

Marketing your restaurant through online advertisements or conventional media can cost a bomb, and might not even be successful in creating branding awareness for your very own cafeteria.

After brainstorming for some novel marketing strategies I could use for my first cafeteria, I would like to share The 4 Most Underrated Marketing Strategies for Your Cafeteria with you guys.

Strategy No. 1: Helium Balloons

Preferably with tall girls giving out the balloons. No, I mean, tall girls are a must. I never knew that the jewelry brand called "Tous" existed before I saw a group of attractive girls in pink, floral dresses giving out balloons with the brand printed on it.

It might be an overused strategy to use cute girls to market your brand, but hey, it still works. Plus the cost of helium balloons and printing your brand on the balloon only costs about USD$0.20 per piece. Totally worth it for the amount of brand awareness that your cafeteria will have when people start to look at your cafeteria's logo printed on the floating balloons.

Strategy No. 2: Trashy Music 

My generation of trashy music includes stuff like 'N Sync, Backstreet Boys and Britney Spears (her old hits like Toxic...) Who doesn't still love them? Or at least, who doesn't remember these really catchy and old-school tunes? It might really turn out positively for your new cafeteria because I feel that this is an excellent attention-grabber.

Ok, for this however, it really depends on the kind of cafeteria/ restaurant that you are going to open. I would advise you against this strategy if say, you're planning to open a really classy coffee house for fanatics of artisan coffee.

Strategy No. 3: Happy Employees 

Happy employees are the most productive ones. The most direct method to increase their happiness would be good salaries and employee benefits. 

Giving them salaries that are slightly above the market rate, especially for part-timers, would definitely increase their enthusiasm and commitment to your cafeteria. More importantly, think of the after-effect. Here's how it goes: 

Your Part-Timer: Hey! I have got this great job at XX Cafeteria and it pays really well! Plus there's    

                            transport back home if I work past 11PM! 

Part-Timer's Friend: Really? What kind of food do they serve? Can I work there as well? 

As word gets around, this not only becomes a form of advertisement (through word-of-mouth) for your cafeteria, you will get more committed and dedicated employees too! Also, in this industry, word-of-mouth marketing is probably the most effective for new cafeterias.

Strategy 4: Membership/ Loyalty Cards

I know, all of us have been to restaurants that give us cards that allow us to redeem free meals/ beverages upon the accumulation of a some stamps or whatsoever. Half of us throw these cards away. More than half, I think. 

But I swear I wouldn't have purchased 18 drinks from Starbucks in less than 2 weeks if it wasn't for the the mini card that was promised to suckers like me if I completed the noble quest. 

The key here is to have a membership card that is nice enough for your customer to keep in his/ her wallet.

I have done some research on making membership cards for my own cafe and I have decided to go for the plastic cards with magnetic strips. Do note that if you are going for the ones with magnetic strips, you must ensure that your cafe's POS system must be able to read them!



That's all I have for now. Do share your ideas with me if you have any! Have a great weekend ahead.

6 Tips on Choosing the Right Utensils for Your Food

Amidst the frenzy of the daily panic attacks you get as the opening day of your restaurant draws nearer, you might forget this: choosing the right utensils for your food.

Don't fret, as the entire purpose of Open Cafeteria is to ensure that you do not miss out important but minute details like this.

Here are 6 tips on choosing the right utensils for your food:

1) Find a reliable wholesaler.

Choose one that is reputable and had supplied to famous restaurants in your city before. That way, you will know that you have got yourself the best deal as they order more from the manufacturers and hence, get them at cheaper prices. If you are starting up a restaurant in Singapore, a good place to start is Sia Huat (Retail Sales). They have a whole inventory of kitchen appliances with offers for up to 30% if you buy in bulk!

One important criteria is also the speed and availability of the resupply of utensils the wholesaler offers to your restaurant. Even more important if your kitchen assistant has butter fingers.

Personally, I would recommend Cerabon Essentials. This brand of utensils is really cheap but apparently reliable as well, because it is widely used by large hotel chains here in Singapore. I heard that it is quite durable as well - some hotels actually sell their used Cerabons to new restaurants!

2) Get your chef to go with you. 

Let the man have his own opinion on how his food will be presented to the customers. If you have little or no experience in this industry, this man will give you practical opinions on what kind of utensils to get.

3) When do you need the utensils by?

A good time to pay a visit to the wholesaler is at least two months prior to your cafeteria's opening date, especially if you intend to print your cafeteria's logo on the plates.

The wholesaler usually outsources the printing, which means that it will lengthen the delivery time to your cafeteria. Depending on the type of printing you go for, high quality printing takes 2-3 weeks for the order to return to the wholesaler.

4) Determine the quantity of utensils needed. 

I am not a math person but let's just use a formula for main serving plates here:

Total number of seating capacity x 120%

Why the 120%? Chances are, some customers might ask for an extra serving plate to share their main courses. You may choose to use smaller sized plates for that, that's your decision to make as a restaurant owner.

5) What is the size of the tables in your own cafeteria?

While shopping for utensils, take note of the size of the plates. If the width of your table is less than 40cm, you definitely can't go for the 30cm round plates. Bear that in mind!

TIP: The last two digits of the barcodes labelled on the plates is usually the size of the plate!

6) Ensure that you have enough dry storage space in your kitchen to store the utensils.

1 plate is about 2cm in height. You do the math.

That's all I have for now. Do check out the featured post of the day and have a great week ahead!

Headhunting

So today, I went out and did some headhunting for my Turkish restaurant.

Why would I spend time going about under the hot sun just to look for a chef?

1. It's really fun!

Have never really been an outspoken person but today I felt like one. I saw this random Middle-Eastern looking guy manning an Arabian carpet store and I just asked him "hey, are you Turkish?". He had solid shoulders and I thought maybe he could help me cut some good kebab for my kiosk instead of just standing around selling carpets. Although my conjecture proved to be wrong (he was Persian and he can't cook), he said his friend might be interested in the job. Score!


2. Job Search Engines are very expensive to advertise on...

This might be a quick and convenient way to get workers but its a really expensive way too. However, for the sake of those looking a good online job seeking websites, here's what you should look for:

- The website should let you advertise for different positions under the same advertisement, and should not make you pay more just to do that. That's unless you're looking for a very specialized professional, of course.
- The website must make it compulsory for employees to send you their resumes one way or another.
- The website has a guarantee that if you do not manage to find the people you are looking for in the period of the advertisement, they will extend your advertisement period for free.


3. You get to earn your workers' loyalty by befriending them

Loyalty leads to devotion, and devotion leads to the workers' full commitment to his work at your restaurant. Remember that being a kitchen staff or a waiter is not an easy job, and it is really difficult to improve their working environment. They will be standing for most of the time during their shift, be it in the hot kitchen or in the restaurant serving customers and taking orders.

Treat these people like your partners; without them, your restaurant will never succeed. As your business improves, give them incentives and reasons to stay. The first step to making them feel important is to approach them first. However, beware of making them feel like your business cannot function without them!


Cheers guys and have a great weekend 

Financing your Small Business

You think you have a great idea for a start-up, but one major inhibiting factor is the lack of capital.
Do not ever give up on your idea because of this reason! 

There are many ways to go about financing your start-up, but I'm only going to talk about "angel investors" in this post. Angel investors can be divided into two distinct groups, which are the institutional groups (governmental and non-governmental ones) and the independent ones, or so to speak, rich people who are willing to invest.

What I feel personally is that institutional groups, more than often, are looking at really specialized industries with high value-added business ideas. They will do very specific and thorough research before throwing their money into your project. Definitely not the restaurant kind of idea.

While you may find more interested investors in the second category comprising of independent investors for your restaurant ideas, these people are hard to look for/ speak to if you do not have the relevant connections.

However, no matter which group you choose to approach, one thing that you will definitely need is your business proposal.


For my project proposal to potential investors (I chose to approach the second group of angel investors), I focused a lot on the finances involved in my cafe business.

1. Executive Summary
You will find a lot of advice online telling you to be very, very concise in your executive summary. Listen to them. A potential investor expects to know important details about your business in this one or two page summary. Some things that I think that are good to include are Long Term Opportunities and Financial Positions/ Requirements. Pretty standard stuff from standard templates but to me, these are the most important.

2. Financial Requirements
Say you want to sell 10% of your company shares. What do you have to do?

Step 1: Ensure that your company is registered properly. Get a lawyer to draft your shareholder's agreement so that the investor knows his position in your company. (I think it is essential to have a company for your cafe even if its a small one.)

Step 2: You have invested say, $9000 into your business. Does that mean that 10% of your company shares is equivalent to $1000 then? Not necessarily. Potential investors buy into your company by looking into the Price-Earning (P/E) Ratio. They use this to determine if your company can give them sustainable returns in the long run. So, Step 2 is basically to find out the P/E of your company. If your company is a new one like mine, the easiest way to go about doing this is to go to finance websites, like Yahoo! Finance and look for companies that are similar to yours. More famous companies in the F&B industry include Food Empire Holdings. A typical F&B company has a P/E of 2-3. You can determine your company's P/E by comparing your company with another listed company that is about the same size as yours, or what you'd expect your company to be in 2-3 years time. So, to sum it up in the layman's language, you have do to up your restaurant's Projected Net Profit and multiply it by the P/E and voila there's your company's net worth!

Projected Net Profit x P/E ratio = Company's Net Worth (so if you want the investor to buy 10% of your company, you take 10% of the company's net worth!)

Do note that this method of determining your P/E is merely a rouge gauge for your executive summary. For more theoretically-sound information, do go to websites like investopedia.com to find out more or read a textbook!

3. Your Restaurant's Projected Revenue/ Net Profit
It is important to include this into your business proposal as investors being investors, they want to know how much your restaurant is expecting to make monthly.

Here's what it should look like, roughly:

You should do a pessimistic, average and optimistic projection of your revenue and make sure you show your investor that even your pessimistic projection allows you to make money! This can be easily done up with Microsoft Excel.

The projection in the picture is a daily projection. You should have a monthly projection and a yearly projection as well, so that you can calculate if your overheads are covered or not.

I will definitely elaborate more on these next time.

Have a great weekend!

Working with Small Spaces

So let's face it. It is really unlikely that your new cafe/ restaurant will have a full-fledged kitchen like you see on reality TV series like Hell's Kitchen.

It would be an absolute luxury to have such a huge space where a dozen people could stand around and work at the same time.

Unfortunately, space constraint is one thing that you will face as a restaurant owner and what you want to do is to maximize the size of your sitting/ dining-in area and minimize the size of your working space (i.e. your kitchen) because it just makes simple business sense to do that. You will want to increase the number of tables and seats in the dining-in area to increase revenue, and you have to do that at the expense of your working area.

1. Planning for your Kitchen Equipment

Even if you have huge area for your kitchen, it is very important for you to know the exact dimensions of the equipment you will be getting.

Planning is absolutely important and it should be finalized at least a month before the renovation of your restaurant starts. This is especially so if your equipment has to be imported. Imagine the hassle if we would have to send back the equipment just because it does not fit. It is your job as the restaurant owner to work with your kitchen consultant to ensure that such hiccups do not happen.

From my personal experience, you have to be really sharp when dealing with the kitchen. It is the heart of your restaurant so you do not want the heart to have any problems, do you? Common things to look out for:

- does the equipment in the CAD (Computer Aided Design) file tally with the equipment list? i.e. Did the kitchen consultant miss out anything in his drawing that you have ordered? For your reference, this is how a CAD file looks like:

- is there a flow in the working area inside the kitchen? for example, do you want the dishwashing area to be in the middle of the kitchen or the side? The side would be better most of the time, because you do not want the dishwasher to block the other kitchen helpers serving the food by being in the middle of nowhere.

What to expect from your Kitchen Consultant:
- any decent kitchen consultant would do up a CAD file for your allocated kitchen space with their proposed plan of where to place your equipment that you are going to order from them
- if they offer you the service, get a 3D design from them
- they have to work very closely with your Interior Designer and submit their finalized plan of the kitchen layout so that your ID can integrate the kitchen layout to his entire restaurant layout


2. Prepping your Staff

The most important man in the restaurant, i.e. the Chef spends most of his time in the kitchen. Imagine you have just poached this really talented chef from a rival restaurant. You offer him a higher pay, better privileges, better working hours and he's sold. The first day he reports for work, he gets the shock of his life because the working space he has is miniscule. How'd you expect him to work?

Well, for me, i would probably face that problem when I hire my second chef (I have already hired my first). How do I avoid such morale issues? I would start by being entirely honest about the small working space he's gonna be working in, and offer him some compensation such as better pay, better prospects (promotions etc. etc.)

As a general guideline, if you are working with a really tight space, I would suggest you have at least 70cm for your walking area around the kitchen. That would give you enough space for two over-sized people to brush against each other. Hahaha.


That's all I have for now. I will definitely go into more detail on how I would plan the kitchen and what kinds of equipment you need for different kinds of food that you can sell.


Feel free to contact me via email if you're looking for a good kitchen consultant. Have a great weekend ahead!

Your Very First Cafeteria

If you're reading this, chances are, you're probably interested in starting up a business in the food and beverages industry. Depending on the type of person you are, you would either want a quaint little cafe where you could retire at, or you are really ambitious and want to own a chain of restaurants or even a company with many restaurants under its belt.

Hardly surprising.

The F&B industry has one of the least barriers of entry in the market simply because it takes no genius to see what you need to get a cafe/ restaurant up and running.

I'm sure you can take of a few things now.... your kitchen... your food... your staff.. But what you're lacking is the specifics which I aim to give to you in this blog. For example, setting up my own kitchen for my cafe at a really, really tight space of 400 sq. ft has been such a huge headache, but we pulled through in the end and got all the equipment that we wanted and needed. I want to share how I did it with you guys. 

 I think that everyone has a keen eye for the market and has a fair chance to succeed in the cafeteria business. We all have our own unique perspectives about what the market demands, and I think that if you are brave enough to venture out of your comfort zone and work hard for your idea to materialize, your dream of having your very own cafe with your name on the door will come through eventually.


Late last year, I acquired a franchise from Turkey and our first outlet is opening in Singapore in a couple of months. After months of working on this project, I thought, hey I should really archive all these to help other people who are interested in starting up a cafe! Right now, we are at our 80% completion mark to our very first outlet in Singapore. Don't worry, because I am going to backtrack to the very start on how this all began and I am going to continue even when the restaurant is up and running.

This goes out especially, to all the young people out there who are interested in starting a business in this area. I am 20 years old at the time of writing, but in the short span of the past six months, I have gained invaluable experience from working with various professionals that has helped to make this happen. Thinking on my feet and brainstorming for the 'next step' has also been very important because that has helped me gain perspective on my very own procedures in opening a cafe (as I plan to expand the business in future).


Stayed tuned for more information on how to set up your very own cafeteria!