As the away-from-home food industry continues to evolve, retail foodservice is quickly becoming one of the fastest-growing segments. Of all the food options available, freshly prepared chicken is the most popular item purchased by consumers.
Recently, a family-owned grocery chain in the Midwest needed a way to keep up with increased demand for carry-out fried chicken — with their prepared food departments seeing an average of 500-800 pieces sold each day.
With their current manual breading system in place, it took the chain’s operators about three hours to properly prepare 500 pieces of chicken, with sifting after every three batches or roughly 90 pieces. This handsifting process is the most time-consuming, labor-intensive part of preparing fried chicken.
With the pressure of managing labor costs, paired with staffing constraints, operators needed to find a way to overcome these challenges and realize time and labor savings with their breading and sifting.
As an alternative to their time-consuming manual sifting method, the grocery chain switched to the compact, automatic Breader Blender Sifter (BBS) from AyrKing at one location — immediately saving operators eight minutes per sifting, which translated to a minimum of one hour of labor saved per store per day.*
Over the course of one year, the savings per store added up quickly:
365 hours of labor saved, at $10/hour, equaled $3,650.
At $15/hour, the savings was as much as $5,475.
With the BBS in place, operators could count on its space-saving footprint to help maximize space behind the counter — all while maintaining the highest levels of quality and consistency with every batch.
AyrKing provided the ideal solution to help this chain keep up with demand for their freshly prepared chicken while realizing significant time and labor savings.
*Based on 10 minutes per manual sifting versus two minutes with BBS automatic sifting, with an average of 7.5 sifts per day.
