The kitchen is where all the magic happens for your business — it's where the food (or drink) is prepared for customers. While a smooth process keeps orders flowing and customers happy, a messy process can lead to costly mistakes and frustrating wait times. 

To ensure your kitchen runs as smoothly as possible, you should consider using a kitchen order display system or upgrading to a system that better fits your business. A kitchen display system is a modern tool that helps commercial kitchens operate more effectively by showcasing orders in real time. Keep reading to learn more about the benefits for a KDS!

What Is a Kitchen Order Display System?

A kitchen display system (KDS) is a system of digital screens located in the kitchen or food prep area of a restaurant. These screens display the orders that have been placed by customers. The kitchen staff uses this information to prepare orders accurately and efficiently.

What Kind of Businesses Need a KDS?

Could a KDS help your business enhance operations and improve customer satisfaction? A kitchen display system can be used to support a variety of food service businesses.

Restaurants:

• Full-Service Restaurants: Utilize KDS to manage complex orders and ensure timely, accurate service.
• Fast Casual and Quick-Service Restaurants (QSRs): Use KDS to streamline high-volume, fast-paced environments, reducing wait times and order errors.
• Chain Restaurants: Use KDS to maintain consistency across multiple locations, ensuring standardized service and quality.
• Franchises: Implement KDS to streamline training and operations, making it easier to manage and expand.

Virtual Kitchens: Rely on KDS to manage multiple food brands operating from a single location, ensuring accurate and timely delivery

Cafés and Bars:

• Coffee Shops: Implement KDS to manage custom drink orders efficiently, ensuring baristas can deliver consistent quality.
• Bakeries and Cafés: Use KDS to keep track of multiple orders and special requests, improving customer service.
• Bars: Implement KDS to manage food orders efficiently, reducing wait times and improving service during busy hours.

Food Trucks and Street Vendors:

• Food Trucks: Benefit from KDS by managing orders in a compact space, speeding up service and improving order accuracy.
• Concession Stands: Implement KDS to efficiently manage high volumes of orders during events, ensuring quick turnaround and minimizing wait times for customers.
• Food Booths: Use KDS to keep track of diverse, custom orders in a bustling environment (like a farmer’s market or fair), enhancing accuracy and speed of service.

Hospitality Venues & Services:

• Hotels and Resorts: Utilize KDS in their restaurants and room service operations to enhance guest experience and efficiency.

Catering Businesses: Use KDS to manage large, complex orders for events, ensuring everything is prepared correctly and on time.

What Are the Benefits of a Kitchen Display System?

Does your kitchen deal with frequent order errors and miscommunications that lead to long wait times during peak hours? If your staff struggles with managing high order volumes that result in long wait times and inefficiencies, your business would benefit from a KDS. A modern system can help you reduce human errors and excessive labor costs caused by turnover due to stress. Switching to a KDS can improve productivity and support a better customer experience.

Here are five ways a KDS can help your business.

1. Improves Communication Between Front & Back Of House

One of the benefits of using a kitchen display system is that it supports clear and quick communication between the front and back of house. In a busy restaurant, it can be difficult for servers to relay messages to the kitchen staff in a timely manner. Paper ticket and label printers only have one-way, one-time communication. If a customer changes their mind after placing their order, the server has to verbally tell the kitchen about the change or handwrite it on the ticket. 

With an integrated KDS changes to an order are communicated to the kitchen displays as updates are made on the POS. This allows the kitchen to prepare the order right the first time.

Additionally, modern kitchen display systems can communicate order status updates back to the POS for the FOH to see. Some kitchen display systems can also communicate directly to customers through SMS text notifications or order tracking boards. These communication methods keep customers updated on their order automatically as the order progresses through the kitchen.

2. Boosts Kitchen Efficiency

A kitchen display system can help increase kitchen efficiency by automating ticket creation and standardizing how your team views in-progress orders. With a kitchen display system, all orders are displayed in one place in a consistent format so that kitchen staff can easily see what needs to be prepared.

This can help to avoid confusion and kitchen staff can work together to get orders out as quickly as possible. Moreover, kitchen display systems often come with timers so that kitchen staff can keep track of how long each dish is taking to prepare. Plus, reporting information can be used to find holdups and further optimize your kitchen's workflow.

3. Increases Speed of Service

With a kitchen display system, orders are instantly inputted into the system and sent to the kitchen staff. This can help to reduce kitchen errors and ensure that customers receive their food promptly. Faster service helps keep your busiest hours under control and improves the customer’s experience with lower wait times.

Color-coded headers change from green to yellow to red the longer tickets are open based on your restaurant's unique speed of service standards. These headers can even be customized based on the order type, so you can set different thresholds for dine-in vs. pickup orders. By communicating this information to the kitchen and managers in real time, a KDS helps keep the kitchen motivated to meet speed-of-service standards.

4. Reduces Paper & Waste

Another benefit of using a kitchen display system is that it can help to reduce waste in the kitchen. With a kitchen display system, there is no need for paper orders. This can help to save money and reduce environmental impact. Check out how PJ’s Coffee used Fresh KDS to improve order accuracy and reduce waste.

Plus, when orders are easier for your team to translate on the fly, there are fewer mistakes in the prep process. A KDS can reduce the number of comps and voids your team has to make due to order mistakes.

5. Enables Detailed Reporting

Kitchen display systems can also provide detailed reports about kitchen performance. This information can be used to identify areas of improvement and make changes to the kitchen's workflow. For example, if you notice that certain dishes are taking too long to prepare, you could make adjustments to the kitchen staff's workload or change the order in which dishes are prepared.

Your KDS should also let you look at the outliers and not just the average prep times for the day. By digging into the details of the customer experience, you can find the times when food was uncharacteristically late, leaving your customer with a frustrating experience. For example, you might find out that during a certain time of the day, being slightly understaffed led to a handful of late orders as the kitchen staff struggled to fill multiple roles.

The Benefit of Working With Fresh KDS

If you're looking for ways to improve your restaurant's operations, then you should definitely consider investing in a kitchen display system. Kitchen display systems offer a variety of benefits that can help to improve communication, increase efficiency, and optimize the workflow in your kitchen. Plus, kitchen display systems are relatively affordable and easy to set up.

With Fresh KDS, you can seamlessly integrate your existing POS systems and use the display screens of your choice. We are determined to offer the best KDS solution out there — one that supports your restaurant operations and team at every turn.

Our user-friendly interface and robust features help streamline kitchen workflows, enhance order accuracy, and reduce wait times for your customers. Fresh KDS provides exceptional customer support and ongoing updates, ensuring you stay up-to-date on the latest advancements in kitchen technology.