Grocery Stores

Prepared meals becoming more popular.

While restaurant traffic grew only 3% over a recent two-year period, grocery prepared meals rose 5%.  This trend is motivating grocery stores to offer even more foodservice options, which is why you need the same equipment more restaurants rely on than any other.

With 550 million rotisserie chicken sales waiting in the wings, it’s never been so easy for grocery stores to clean up.  The new Self-Cleaning KA7E Rotisserie makes cooking and cleaning one-button simple. To cook, the operator simply selects from the 99 recipes you can easily enter—with four-stage cooking and automatic hold cycle—and presses Start. To clean, the operator just presses Clean.

Fresh from the oven. Even five days later. Cook Chill lets your staff prepare foods ahead of time, blast chill them for storage and simply rethermalize to serve. The perfect combination for a seamless Cook Chill operation is the Hobart Combi® Oven and Traulsen Blast Chillers. The Hobart Combi is amazingly easy to use. The operator just selects the item to be cooked and presses Start.

Traulsen Blast Chillers are the leaders in the industry for taking prepared food safely through the Danger Zone—from 135˚F to 41˚F—in approximately 90 minutes.

Fresh and easy. To keep your ingredients fresh, safe and near at hand, there’s Traulsen’s full-size, stainless steel undercounter refrigerators with INTELA-TRAUL® microprocessor controls for precise temperatures.

Let customers see for themselves how fresh their sandwiches, subs, tacos, pizzas and other menu choices are by preparing them on a Traulsen VPS (Venturi Plenum System) prep table. Its patented, advanced system of air ducts and baffles keeps everything fresh and safe.

Being different by making a difference. Adopting a sustainable design program.

According to a recent survey, it’s the number one equipment trend in the grocery industry: sustainable design. Operations are looking for equipment that saves them water and energy, reduces waste and is environmentally friendly. Put them together and you have the foundation for a sustainable design program. Hobart is a proud supporter of sustainable design.

Grocery take-home meals are cooking.

As the role of prepared foods for take-home and dine-in becomes a larger part of grocery operations—with an annual sales growth rate nearly twice that of other food items —the kitchen has naturally expanded, resembling the foodservice kitchen with which it competes. Suddenly there are extra pots, pans, bowls, utensils and even dishes to clean and sanitize. With more food to cook comes a need for additional ovens, steamers, refrigerators and hot-food holding cabinets.

Fortunately, you couldn’t have picked a more opportune time to create a sustainable kitchen.

More than 400 models of ENERGY STAR® rated equipment from which to choose.

Let’s start your sustainable kitchen with a piece of equipment you might not be that familiar with: the warewasher. A staple in foodservice kitchens for generations, it not only cleans the ware more efficiently—saving time and labor—but it also sanitizes the ware. If you’re using a three-compartment sink, there’s really no practical way to know if you’re sanitizing your ware. Without sanitized pots, pans, utensils and other ware, your food-safety program is in jeopardy. With Hobart’s ENERGY STAR rated warewashers, you can be sure your ware is clean and sanitized.

Long the most popular and reliable in the industry, Hobart warewashers simultaneously address your cleaning, sanitizing and sustainability needs. Hobart’s most versatile warewasher is the AM Select. NSF-Certified to clean and sanitize both pots and pans, and delicate glasses and dishes, it’s like getting two warewashers in one. ENERGY STAR rated, it can save you as much as $1,400 a year in water, sewer and energy costs, compared to its previous model.

A very compact and flexible warewashing solution is the Hobart LXi undercounter. Also ENERGY STAR rated, it can save you up to $500 a year in water, sewer and energy costs, compared to prior LXi models. As an undercounter, the LXi can easily fit in departments (deli, bakery, coffee shops, restaurant-styled food places, cheese, etc.) throughout the store. Large food retail operations should look at Hobart’s ENERGY STAR rated CLe conveyor-type warewasher, the most efficient in its class in terms of space, energy, water and labor.

For both your cold and hot-food storage needs, Traulsen has more than 100 ENERGY STAR rated refrigerators, freezers and hot-food holding cabinets. Traulsen’s ENERGY STAR rated refrigerators and freezers can reduce your energy consumption by as much as 45%.

To cook with ENERGY STAR efficiency and savings, try Hobart steamers. Our HPX Series steamers can save you up to $450 a year in energy costs and reduce your water consumption by more than 90%, compared to non-ENERGY STAR models.

The technology trend: food goes digital.

Since 1974, when the UPC barcode was first introduced, retail food stores have adapted new technologies to improve productivity, increase efficiency, lower food prices and provide a higher—and more personal—level of customer service.

With the help of technology, the food retail industry is now also enjoying success in reducing shrink, as it has steadily declined from a median of 2% in 2004 to 1.69% in 2005 and to 1.52% in 2006.  Unlike most retail business, food-store shrink is not caused primarily by theft and errors, such as mispricing. Perishables account for up to 80% of total food-store shrink , with managers forced to discard nearly $20 billion in food annually.

Hobart technology supports your efforts to improve productivity, increase efficiency, enhance customer service and reduce shrink in all its forms.

The Hobart HLX Service Scale.

Consider it a computer that weighs and prints labels. Whether communicating over a local or wide-area network, via a wired or wireless connection, the HLX automatically synchronizes with other scales in the department to ensure data consistency and accuracy, eliminating pricing discrepancies. By accessing the store intranet, operators can get daily or weekly information, work schedules and more. You can configure, update and verify all your HLX scales remotely, from software upgrades to price changes to PLU database modifications.

Increasing productivity by reducing shrink.

The HLX’s shelf-life feature generates an easy-to-read label that lets you monitor the expiration dates of perishable products at a glance. The HLX also lets you track the shelf life of products by days and even by hours, helping you minimize throwaways and better manage your Fresh Item Inventory.

Now cleaning a rotisserie is as easy as cooking with one. Presenting the KA7E.

The operator simply presses the Clean button and the KA7E automatically cleans itself. Suddenly one of the most dreaded and time-consuming cleanup jobs in food preparation is done and gone, reducing your labor costs while improving morale.

The KA7E makes rotisserie cooking one-button simple, too. The operator simply selects the cooking program—you can program up to 99 recipes—and presses Start.

The Hobart Access Automatic Wrapping System.

You couldn’t put your cuts in better hands. The Hobart Access Automatic Wrapping System automatically centers, wraps and labels each tray. The labels are high resolution with smaller barcodes, leaving more room for merchandising messages. Cleaning up is easy, too. The operator simply hoses the Access down.

It’s also a Web browser.

Like the HLX, the Access is a multi-communications tool, allowing you to access the Internet or a customized store Web site with either a wired or wireless Ethernet connection. You could use it to access weekly or even daily information, employee schedules, new product information, etc. Diagnostic information can be retrieved remotely. Scale configuration and the PLU database can be verified or modified. Supervisors can monitor the real-time use of the scale.

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