You may have picked this up, we use 3-letter call names for all of our locations. Sometime mid-winter KIT was born. The operation that supports the trucks and restaurant was becoming large enough that it needed it’s own call letters. I think soon we should add a twitter feed for KIT.

The trucks (and restaurant) do a lot of their own prep. Maybe 40% of what they sell they chop onboard. The rest requires heavy equipment (think machines that whirl, large pots and very large burners, etc.) That heavy prep is made back in our kitchen, which is currently at HSQ and soon to be at the HUB. As we expand that part of the operation grows larger and larger. It’s pretty overwhelming sometimes.

This is a picture of a new scheduling board we put together to manage the kitchen activities. There are so many things that happen each day we had to add a shift. Then we started getting too busy for just 2 shifts and had to start coordinating the activities very tightly. So now we’ve ended up with boards like this.

I’ll walk you through an example: the falafel requires the sink and 1 table, so that all gets scheduled on this board. Some items (seitan) require a table and a burner, so they get scheduled in sequence. We were having problems in the past where one person would be making the seitan logs, meanwhile the burners were starting to fill up with somebody else’s activities. We just don’t have enough burners to do this uncoordinated. Every single table is booked almost the entire day, that’s how tight it’s running.

We started out with the whiteboard but it became a mess. So this current version uses these magnetic pieces that we can move when things change in the schedule.