Five habits learnt in other people's kitchens

I begin with the people who will operate a machine on a short-staffed morning. In our customers' central kitchens and care-home kitchens, many operators are in their sixties or seventies, and some read Japanese as a second language. That changes the specification. Loading heights, the weight of removable parts, the force needed to open a door and the number of steps to start a programme become requirements with measured limits, not ergonomic notes added after styling. We test prototypes with working crews in their own kitchens, timing each task and recording where people hesitate. These requirements sometimes cost capacity or add material. When they do, I put the cost in front of sales and finance rather than letting it slide into a later option. A machine that a smaller, older crew cannot use safely has not met its brief.

Commercial kitchen equipment often outlives its controller. I treat the repair-parts period as a product commitment written into the design brief, not a service policy drafted afterwards. For our core families we now hold parts for ten years after the end of production, and each new controller must replace earlier generations without rewiring. That requires purchasing to choose components with long supply commitments, designers to keep connectors and mounting points stable, and finance to accept a larger parts inventory. I also review the parts cooks remove every day, because gaskets, baskets and filters wear faster than frames. Authorised dealer engineers receive our wiring diagrams and service manuals. A register of every part approaching the end of its supply lets us decide a redesign deliberately, before a dealer discovers the gap in a customer's kitchen.

Hot oil, gas burners, steam and wet floors make safety the first item in every design review. I chair reviews in which designers show how each foreseeable misuse was examined, from a basket dropped too quickly into oil to a kettle tilted with its lid still latched. Our quality-assurance director decides on inspection campaigns and recalls; my responsibility is to make sure the product team supplies its evidence promptly and does not defend its own design. When a field action is needed, I ask for a notice a kitchen manager can act on in two minutes, sent through the dealers who know where each unit stands. The slowest part of a field action is often finding the equipment, so serial records and installation addresses matter as much as the engineering correction. I describe past actions only in general terms, because the details are confidential.

Our connected ovens and fryers keep temperature records that customers can use within their HACCP-based hygiene plans. I am careful about what that record proves. A cavity sensor measures the oven, not the food; a core probe measures only the point where it was inserted; a network can fail in the middle of lunch service. Our equipment therefore stores records locally, marks gaps as gaps and flags any core reading taken without an inserted probe. Quality assurance reviews the marketing wording before release, and we do not describe any product as making a kitchen compliant. Customers decide their own hygiene controls; our equipment makes the evidence easier to keep. I also limit what we collect. Usage data helps dealers plan maintenance, but customers choose whether to share it, and the equipment keeps cooking if they decline.

An export variant is a different product, not a domestic model with a new plug. In Thailand I learnt to begin with the destination kitchen: its gas supply, voltage and frequency, water hardness, ambient heat, cleaning chemicals and the dishes it actually cooks. Our Southeast Asian fryers use burners adjusted for bottled gas, and our dishwashers for hard-water regions carry different scale protection. Each market has its own electrical, gas and sanitation certifications, which our certification engineers manage with local test laboratories. I will decline an export order if we cannot support the equipment with trained engineers and stocked parts in that country. Those refusals have cost us orders from distributors who wanted a low price without a service commitment. I count them as part of the product, because an unsupported fryer in a hotel kitchen becomes our problem within a year.