Harrah’s Entertainment, Inc., the hotel and gaming conglomerate, long ago decided in areas with properties close to each other it could centralize some of its cooking to save money, create consistency, and enhance food safety. Harrah’s has 43 properties worldwide encompassing 10 different brands and 396 restaurants, which generate $1.6 billion in F&B revenue. Of that number, Harrah’s six Las Vegas properties housing more than 50 restaurants are responsible for slightly more than half the company’s total F&B volume. Harrah’s has 17,670 rooms in Las Vegas, which often run close to 100 percent occupancy. In 2005, those six hotels handled 21,804,000 covers and averaged revenues of $60,000 a day.
“Las Vegas is a very high-frequency destination market,” says Bill Barum, corporate director of culinary operations and kitchen design and development at Harrah’s headquarters in Las Vegas.
JUST MAKES SENSE
In large operations where production is demanding, says Barum, it makes sense to have a “commissary/cook chill kitchen,” which uses 50- to 100-gallon stock pots, 80-gallon square skillets, and huge combi ovens to produce base ingredients. This might include “mother” sauces and other commonly used ingredients such as roasted meats, which are allocated by need to however many restaurants depend on that production equipment using a “food bank” system.
“We only produce items that are beneficial to do so,” says Barum. “We don’t produce every single item for every single property. We select the top fifteen or twenty of spend categories, the biggest opportunities to consolidate, and that’s what we go after.” After identifying those most commonly used items, continues Barum, “we standardize recipes for certain products. The chefs agree on how they are supposed to taste and what they are supposed to do and then we put them back into a centralized recipe standard and ship them to the different properties.
“We only produce items that are beneficial to do so,” says Barum. “We don’t produce every single item for every single property. We select the top fifteen or twenty of spend categories, the biggest opportunities to consolidate, and that’s what we go after.” After identifying those most commonly used items, continues Barum, “we standardize recipes for certain products. The chefs agree on how they are supposed to taste and what they are supposed to do and then we put them back into a centralized recipe standard and ship them to the different properties. We need bang for our buck. We don’t just go in and make 100 different line items.”
Every day each outlet files a purchase order, which is filled, and the “food bank” is continually replenished. “This gives you an opportunity to produce your core value products and to do it efficiently,” Barum says.
In Las Vegas, Harrah’s has its cook-chill kitchen at the Paris Las Vegas Hotel, which makes key products for the other five properties, all of which are no more than one mile away. “So you no longer have to have twenty-some kitchens making an alfredo sauce,” says Barum. “You make it in one place. You control the ingredient line, all the things with food safety, the cost, and you ship out a base product to which a restaurant chef or an executive chef adds his touches. It becomes his sauce.” By centralizing major kitchen functions, labor is consolidated: “You don’t need people in all the restaurants to make all the products.”
In other areas where Harrah’s has several casinos near each other including Atlantic City, New Jersey; Tunica, Mississippi; and Tahoe, Nevada, the company is also employing cook-chill kitchens. Food is prepared then shipped in five- or ten-gallon urethane “chubs” in controlled atmosphere trucks. “Casinos are such large production houses you have to search out improved methods for being efficient,” Barum says.
Harrah’s has used production kitchens since 1998. Barum says a few other casinos in Las Vegas have production facilities, like MGM, but believes Harrah’s may have been the first to employ the concept in town. “It’s an area we’ve been involved with for a while,” he says. “I can’t say we pioneered it. I was with Walt Disney World before I came here, and we had a central commissary there where we produced all the soups and sauces. Any time you’re looking to consolidate labor it’s the way to go and also to absolutely address the food safety issues.”
Paris Las Vegas has a specially designed commissary kitchen and, although one might think it would be enormous, it manages to do everything in just 3,000 square feet. Within the space are cook tanks and kettles. Paris is using a mixture of equipment from Groen and other companies but, observes Barum, “we are in the process of modernizing that plant and going into Tucs [made in Frindley, Minnesota], which has shown to be more efficient on a smaller footprint.” The kitchen has Alto-Shaam and RATIONAL combis (for seafood and vegetables), which Barum says are efficient and high performing.
Tucs Equipment provides a steam-jacketed kettle system, which can be as large as 800 gallons and measures and pumps product via a piston into the chubs, tagging and dating them. The vacuum-sealed chubs can extend the shelf life of products by up to 40 days, says Barum. Tuc’s system incorporates square kettles with impellers on the side that keep food circulating. “They keep all of the particulation,” says Barum, “all of the pieces in say a stew or chili or soup moving and suspended in such a manner that when it’s pumped out at the bottom of the kettle there’s an even distribution of heavy particulate to liquid ... The technology from Tuc’s lets us bag an evenly particulated product.” As large as they are, Barum says the kettles are easy to clean. Pulleys are used to tip them on their sides, where they are cleaned using a highpowered hose and scrub pad. Troughs built in the floor in front of the kettles serve as drains for residue.
Harrah’s also takes advantage of “shared services”—one kitchen might bake bread for another property. Bally’s is creating a bread production facility, and Rio has a cold kitchen that produces cut vegetables and fruits for other properties. “We’re consolidating the labor in appropriate areas to supply product,” observes Barum.
TIME AND MONEY PLUS
Converting a kitchen in Tahoe let Harrah’s take 14 full-time employees off the payroll and consolidate work into four people. Systems like those made by Tuc’s cost from $300,000 to $1 million, depending on the production output, but ROI, says Barum, is usually within three to five years when factoring in labor savings.
The optimal farthest distance between a central kitchen and another property is two miles although in Tunica, where properties are more spread out, Harrah’s is considering traversing up to five miles. Greater distances between properties would require a study regarding the transportation of product, says Barum: “You can’t move safely a lot of foods at great distances.”
Barum has no concerns guests will feel they’re eating the same products at each property “because we’re only shipping a base product and then the individual chefs and restaurants tweak those to make their own statement. The food does not taste the same at every property—that’s for sure.” For example, a Mornay sauce base can become four or five other sauces after different chefs work their magic on it. Recipes cooked on such a mammoth scale must be constantly tested and tasted. “One of the key disciplines is that everything is tasted all the time ... every chub that gets rethermalized is tasted and the chef adjusts the flavor profiles and fine tunes it. In our business you can’t just open up a bag and go, that’s very short-sighted and unprofessional.”
In addition to base products like sauces and soups, Harrah’s has centralized the cooking of some proteins such as rib roast and turkey breast, also using a cook tank system. As Barum says, “the meats are seasoned completely ... put in a bag and immersed in hot water. We have less than 3 percent shrinkage on this product and all the flavors are intact.”
However, Barum asserts production kitchens do far more than just save money: “It’s not specifically about saving money, it’s about achieving a consistent product, having a product that’s safe as far as foodborne bacteria is concerned because it’s isolated systems packed in a vacuum. There is a measurable control on the recipes because everything is dialed in and balanced.” Each recipe comes with hazardous and critical control points along the way. “Food safety is a huge issue especially when you have so many risks with that kind of volume cooking.”
Beth Rogers is a frequent contributor to HOTEL F&B EXECUTIVE.
