Scratch or Pre-Made?

The starship Enterprise of "Star Trek" fame has a simple food preparation system: You simply tell a computer what you want and how it should be prepared. After a brief time, you open a sliding door to retrieve your meal. The system rates high on convenience (although you never hear Captain Kirk or his crew comment on the taste).

Of course, when we do arrive at that level of food preparation convenience, the restaurant as we know it will take on a whole new personality. In the meantime, every restaurateur in the process of developing a new menu or revising an existing one will need to make a variety of decisions regarding the balance between preparing foods from scratch or using a variety of pre-made menu products. Like so much else in the restaurant universe the options and opinions are many and varied. The purpose of this article is to provide you some of those opinions and help you make reasoned decisions on what's best for your startup.

Rarely do you find restaurants that are either all "scratch" or all "pre-made." Of course, the exception is that many limited-service, fast-food operations use pre-made almost exclusively (that's one way they keep their food costs so predictable). Most everyone else uses a mixture of the two approaches. Certainly the balance between pre-made and scratch can change over time but as your kitchen opens you want to have an understanding of the advantages and disadvantages of each approach. Figuring out the right balance of customer acceptance, kitchen staff and equipment capabilities, storage space, menu pricing and food costs all play a part in whatever combination you use. Another big factor in the decision can be your philosophy (and maybe your ego).

While "scratch vs. pre-made" is not a simple question, there's no right or wrong answer. Pre-prepped, prepared or precooked items have been around for hundreds of years and are used by the restaurant industry because they save time, money and are accepted by the customer. There are many options because the variety and quality of pre-made items at all levels have improved dramatically during the last 40 years. For example, the variety of chicken products alone offers a glimpse of the staggering choices you have.

You can buy a whole chicken, a chicken breast or legs, chicken with or without skin and bones, portioned chicken, cooked chicken, marinated chicken. At the same time, the quality of pre-made items has kept pace with the variety of products. For example, rapid freezing techniques, advanced yeast performance, and packaging innovations in the bakery industry have made frozen dough welcome in both sandwich shops and French-style restaurants.

Today, almost any level of food preparation is available. This is wonderful, except that it makes "scratch vs. pre-made" decisions a little confusing.