Aiming to address issues such as the shortage of skilled stuff, cost pressure, and digitisation, Rational has created the iKitchen.
“Under the name iKitchen, we have combined iCombi Pro, iVario Pro and ConnectedCooking to form a system solution,” says Thomas Hofer, Managing Director RATIONAL Kitchen & Catering Equipment Trading FZCO, explaining the basic features. The aim is to make work easier, especially in large kitchens with a volume of 500 meals per day or more, to streamline processes and save space, money, energy and raw materials.”
Hofer also knows a good example: “If you take a kitchen originally equipped with a tipper, boiler, deep fryer, pressure cooker, hot-air oven and cooker, you can replace all appliances except the cooker with iCombi Pro and iVario Pro. And achieve space savings of up to 40 %. At the same time, both cooking systems together cover up to 90 % of all conventional cooking applications.”
For some applications, such as cooking pasta or preparing food using the sous-vide method, they can even take over tasks from each other, thus considerably increasing the flexibility of a commercial kitchen. As a rule, cooking is also healthier.
As Hofer says: “With the iCombi Pro, for example, you can deep-fry without fat. This means that the fries are as crispy as desired, but have considerably less fat. And steaming with the iCombi Pro preserves vitamins and nutrients much better”.
The fact that both cooking systems are made for cooperation is also shown by the identically designed user interfaces, which guide the user through the menus according to the same principle.
Both also have intelligent functions that make handling even easier and thus significantly reduce the error rate. Even semiskilled workers have easy access to various cooking applications. The fact that iKitchen makes optimum use of all resources is demonstrated, for example, by overnight cooking. Both the iCombi Pro and iVario Pro feature this application, thus saving a great deal of production time, which takes a lot of pressure off the kitchen.
The third component, ConnectedCooking, also serves to increase productivity, as the networking solution can be used to centrally manage and transfer cooking programs, for example, HACCP data can be retrieved and stored by both cooking systems, and the iCombi Pro can even be controlled remotely. This saves many ways, reduces the error rate and ensures a constant standard in food production.
Only the loading and unloading has to be done personally. Hofer´s conclusion: “With iKitchen, canteen kitchens can work even more successfully than before and respond flexibly to their challenges.”
