The best way to determine if your commercial foodservice operation will benefit from investing in equipment or upgrades is to calculate the savings that you will gain if you make a purchase. The food processor is a great example because you can relate the labor that will be replaced by the equipment in a straight forward manner. Are you thinking of purchasing a new commercial food processor? There are many good brands available, like Robot Coupe Food Processors or Waring Food Processors.
Use the formula below with actual figures from your operation to calculate how much money you’ll save with a new food processor. From there you can determine if it’s a good investment for your foodservice operation.
1. Determine the total amount of time it takes to process all items in your operation. This includes all items that are processed by hand and the number of people and hours that are required for completion of all that hand work.
2. Determine the length of time it would take to complete that same amount of hand processing with a single person using a food processor. Most equipment will provide you with the number of items it can process per hour or in smaller time increments. For instance, a Robot Coupe R2N can process 850 servings in 3 hours or less.
3. Subtract the shorter amount of time for automated food processing from the greater amount of time for hand processing.
4. Multiply the number of hours of labor that will be saved by the hourly wage that is paid for that labor to calculate the daily savings.
5. Further multiply the daily savings by the number of operating days per year; if you are open 5 days a week for fifty weeks, that would be 250 days. This will provide you with the first year savings.
6. Subtract the cost of the food processor you choose from the gross first year savings you’ve calculated in step five to get your first year net savings. Every year after that your savings would be the full amount.
To calculate the full benefit of your purchase you would use the expected lifetime of the equipment in your operation and multiply that out by annual savings for the balance of years after your first year net savings. If you expect a machine to last for three years, you will add the first year net savings to two full years of savings as your payback on the investment. It should be simple to understand if a purchase is a good decision or not with the numbers in front of you.
