A big event last Saturday made me rethink my whole prep system

I had 200 covers for a wedding and my walk-in cooler died at noon, lost $400 worth of mise en place. Has anyone else dealt with a cooler failure on a busy night?

2 comments

2 Comments

coleman.seth23d ago

Strongly disagree with the whole premise here. Losing $400 in prep and a cooler at noon sounds like a wake up call, not a reason to rethink the system. If your whole operation falls apart because one piece of equipment goes down, that just means you were already skating by on thin ice to begin with. Real prep systems have backups for the backups, not just crossed fingers and hope. Maybe the real lesson is that you didn't have a big enough cushion to absorb a basic equipment failure.

maryh9623d ago

But isn't that kind of the point though? Not every kitchen can afford to have backup coolers sitting around collecting dust, especially not small places that are just trying to get by. Saying the lesson is to have a bigger cushion feels a bit like telling someone who got hit by a car that they should have worn a helmet. Sometimes stuff just happens and you're not gonna have a spare of everything - that's not being unprepared, it's just being realistic about what you can actually afford to stock. A $400 loss for a small operation can be the difference between making payroll that week or not, and that's a real problem with how tight margins are. It's not about having crossed fingers, it's about how much risk a business can take on before it breaks. I'm not saying backups are bad, but calling a system broken just because it can't survive a single cooler dying at noon feels like ignoring how most restaurants actually operate.