Restaurant chain gains big advantage from HOUNÖ’s cloud solution

Food safety has top priority.

With 14 restaurants in Denmark and a forthcoming expansion to Germany, the restaurant chain Flammen has developed a true heartwarming concept using quality ingredients for their grill buffet while targeting full satisfaction from their 17-18,000 weekly guests.

In 2017, Flammen installed HOUNÖ Visual Cooking combi ovens in their restaurants. Quickly, they saw the advantages of connecting the award-winning cloud solution Let’s Cook to their current set-up.

Allan Sunddal, Quality Manager at Flammen, explains:

“It all started with a desire to secure and document that what we do is done correctly and after the book. We wanted to ensure the procedures and the quality in connection to e.g. medium and well-done meat. The Technical University of Denmark has analyzed the importance of keeping a steady temperature when preparing the meat at a lower temperature using the Sous Vide method. Despite not using this particular method, we are able to control the temperature with the program Cook & Hold ensuring that the meat does not dry out during cooking.”

If the Danish Health Authority questions whether the rules have been followed and, in this case, whether the meat has been cooked thoroughly, Flammen can easily extract the HACCP files from the ovens through Let’s Cook and thereby fully document the cooking temperatures.

Customized recipes ease the workflow

A large part of Allan Sunddal’s job is to customize user-friendly recipes to be used at the restaurants. These are easily made and quickly distributed via Let’s Cook to the staff and from there they can follow the directions of the oven directly on the Android-based touch screen.

Allan Sunddal explains further:

Most of the staff is trained by Flammen with limited or no knowledge of the restaurant business. Therefore, it is important to structure and simplify the processes.

At the same time, Let’s Cook has led to an optimization of the processes via overnight roasting and the time spent through a reduction of smaller tasks.

“When we run the programs, there are less tasks the staff has to do. Open the oven, letting the food cool off, take the food on the table and getting it back into the oven – these are all tasks the oven manages. Many of the smaller tasks have been eliminated to make it easier for the staff releasing time to focus on other things”.

Enhanced quality through managing processes

The combination of Visual Cooking Ovens and the digital platform Let’s Cook gives Flammen an improved end result.

The cloud solution is also being used to extract data. Besides the HACCP files, Flammen is making use of the possibility to analyze the consumption list e.g. power consumption, benchmarking the restaurants against each other and getting insight in whether the programs are used correctly.

Going forward, a proactive prevention of service and a reduction of the oven down time can also be on their agenda using the Let’s Cook platform to the fullest.

Allan Sunddal participates in an ongoing dialogue with HOUNÖ to exchange knowledge of possible development areas of the cloud solution.

Benefits of the Let’s Cook cloud solution

• Immediate distribution of recipes from headquarters to restaurant
• Prevent maintenance and down time
• Easy overview of consumption data
• Online knowledge platform
• Community for chefs around the world