Everything up to now happens once. This chapter is about what happens four hundred times a month, during service, while the dining room is also full. Delivery breaks kitchens not because it is hard but because it arrives unannounced in the middle of everything else.
⏱️ The order flow, start to finish
Write down what actually happens in your kitchen today, from the moment an order lands to the moment it leaves. Most restaurants find they have never described it, and that nobody agrees on who owns which step.
- It lands. On a tablet, a printer, or in your POS. Someone has to notice. Who?
- It is accepted, with a time. The prep time you enter here becomes the promise the customer sees. Optimism costs you a star.
- It is fired. Slotted against dine-in tickets, not before or after them by default.
- It is packed and checked. Against the ticket, by someone, every time.
- It is handed off. To a courier who is often new, in a hurry and does not speak to the kitchen.
The two steps that get skipped under pressure are the second and the fourth — the time promise and the pack check — and they are the two that generate almost all the complaints.
📟 Tablet hell, and how to get out of it
Three platforms means three tablets, three sounds, three interfaces, and one person trying to retype orders into the POS during a rush. Every retyped order is a chance to get it wrong.
- Native POS integration is the real fix. Orders land as tickets. Ask for it by name when you sign, not after.
- An order aggregator is the second best: one device, all platforms, one feed into the POS.
- If neither is possible, at minimum give the tablets one owner per shift by name, one location, and one printer. Ambiguity about who watches the tablet is how a fifteen-minute order becomes a forty-minute one.
📦 Packaging is part of the recipe
Packaging is where food quality is either preserved or destroyed, and it is the one cost that never appears on the platform statement.
| Problem | Cause | What fixes it |
| Crisp food arrives soft | Trapped steam | Vented containers; never seal hot fried food airtight |
| Sauce everywhere | Sauce on the dish, movement in transit | Sauce on the side for anything that travels more than ten minutes |
| Cold on arrival | Thin single-use containers, long waits | Insulated or double-walled for the dishes that need it; stage packing to finish as the courier arrives |
| Wrong or missing item | No check step | Pack against the printed ticket, initial it, seal it |
| Spills in the bag | Loose lids, no stability | Tamper seals, flat bases, heavy items at the bottom |
Tamper seals do double duty: they reassure the customer and they settle the argument about whether an item was missing when it left you.
🚗 Working with couriers you do not employ
The courier is the last person to touch your food and usually the only one the customer meets. You cannot manage them, but you can make their job easy:
- A clear, marked pickup point, ideally not through the dining room.
- Orders staged with the name and platform visible without asking.
- Somewhere to stand that is not in the way, so they wait rather than hover over the pass.
- Do not release the bag until the food is actually ready. A courier waiting three minutes is better than food sitting fifteen in a car.