The new Henny Penny F5 fryer will train you

27/10/2023

One reality that often gets overlooked when debating the overall performance of kitchen equipment is user compliance. Do crews use the machine properly all the time? How closely are they following procedures? Do they take short cuts or skip steps like filtering when things get busy?

 

Obviously, time spent training and monitoring new hires is meant to minimize future mistakes and non-compliance. But the current labor situation practically guarantees there will always be inexperienced staff. And that makes time spent training part of the problem. It also draws a big fat circle around something everyone knows: the more there is to learn, the more likely inexperienced crew are to become overwhelmed or dismissive of the process. Conversely, the easier it is to do something properly, the more often it gets done.

 

In this post, we make the case that the new Henny Penny F5 fryer can break through the constant cycle of hiring and training with an intuitive control that basically allows crew to train themselves as they do the work.

 

A Universal Approach

The overall goal for this next generation fryer was always about being more energy efficient, more oil efficient, easier to service, and just simply easier to operate. After more than a year of beta and pre-production testing, the Henny Penny Global Account team found the thing our QSR customers appreciate most about the F5 fryer is ease of use.

 

The idea behind the F5 control panel is that everyone is on a touchscreen these days. Most of us have no trouble using new mobile apps because the interface is intuitive. It has to be, since there aren’t any instructions. Why not make a fryer touchscreen work more like an iPad than an old ATM?

 

That meant starting with a true capacitive display that you can swipe and tap. But the idea had to be taken further: Display what needs to be shown on each screen with pictures and, where necessary, simple but complete words. No jargon, acronyms, or mystery abbreviations. Use familiar organizational logic with easily recognizable icons. Make it like the latest generation of POS terminals and kiosks where orders are placed. Why should a fryer be any harder to operate?

 

In the world of arcane control board logic, it was a simple but profound question. And the answer was written plainly on the face of every high school kid looking at the alphanumeric code blinking and scrolling across LED strips like it was another language. There was nothing to be gained from a proprietary operating interface and everything to be gained from a more universal approach.

 

Most manufacturers of kitchen equipment, including some well-known fryers, have moved to touchscreens but stopped short of the F5’s intuitive interface. Paul Parsons, Henny Penny Director of Global Accounts, said “The feedback we were getting at the NAFEM tradeshow was that these other touchscreens were still button-centric and very clunky. There was still a learning curve. When they started messing around with the F5 units we had on display, they were saying ‘This is just so much easier!’”

 

Or, as Matt Greear, Henny Penny Manager of Product Platforms, put it: “Our customers didn’t need a new way to display a button. What they needed was a fryer with controls that everybody already knew how to use.”

 

I said: ‘Okay, cook me some fries.’

Field tests confirmed how much easier the intuitive control made the transition for new employees. Typically, an experienced employee follows the new person around all day, explaining how things work and telling them what to do every step of the way. The fry station tends to be the place they start and is a rite of passage for new hires. It may also be the reason many of them don’t stick around.

 

“It’s a difficult context,” says Mike Wood, Henny Penny Global Account Manager. “You’re unfamiliar with the kitchen environment. Everything is always beeping. The fryer starts beeping at you, and nobody knows why its beeping at you. You get frustrated. With the F5 it’s very clear why the fryer wants your attention. The alert has visual meaning behind it. It’s showing you what to do next. There’s no long curve of training for understanding how this equipment works. There’s some learning involved, but it happens between the user and the machine. There’s no teaching required.”

 

Bottom line: a sixteen-year-old can walk in on their first day and start cooking fries.

 

Jean-Marc Ciuchno, International Global Account Manager for Henny Penny, more or less proved that when he introduced the fryer to one restaurant crew for the very first time. “I said: ‘Okay, cook me some fries’ without any training, nothing. They were easily able to start cooking without any training at all.”

 

Tap an icon and the timer starts. In their environment it clicks with them.

 

According to Parsons, employee turnover at high-volume QSR restaurants isn’t going away any time soon. “Right now, in the U.S., we’re in this endless cycle of hiring and training, hiring and training. What we believe—and what we’re starting to hear at the restaurants—is that the transition is much easier with the F5 because of the intuitive control. You don’t need someone to babysit a new employee and look over their shoulder and say, here’s what you do. You also don’t see the employee struggling as much because there aren’t all these push buttons that require tribal knowledge to understand. Instead, you’re doing the same thing you’re doing when you’re scrolling through an app on your phone. Everything is on the screen in front of you. Tap an icon and the timer starts. In their environment it clicks with them.”

 

This wasn’t necessarily the case with everyone. “We did morning and afternoon trainings,” said Wood. “We found a natural difference between age groups that you’d expect. The morning group during the week tend to be veterans. They’d be checking out the control, asking us how it works, or tapping really hard. The after-school crowd didn’t even ask. They’d swipe, tap, drop the fries and start cooking. In the afternoons we just had less hands-on training to do.”

 

The focus on images puts crew on a more even footing, says Ciuchno. “In Europe, we’ve got a lot of people speaking different languages. Translations and words can really goof things up. Now that we can look at an image of a product rather than reading the name of it, that’s huge. And it’s not just about finding the product to cook, but also for tasks that need completed. When it’s time to filter, you just press an image and follow the steps. If you need to skim the vat, a picture of that pops up in front of you. You know exactly what to do.”

 

The Wow Factor

The Henny Penny product team determined early on that images would be more effective than video for operations like cleaning, filtering, or basic troubleshooting. In fact, there are no separate training videos to watch. You just find what you need to do and proceed screen to screen at your own pace. The images show the same machine you are standing in front of and exactly what you should be doing with it.

 

“I’ve had people go ‘oh wow!’ when they first see the pictures on the screen,” laughs Parsons. “Our new fryer literally has the wow factor!”

 

The product team went into the development of this control intent on finding a way to reduce the operational friction of constant hiring and training that has become a fact of life behind the QSR counter. What we came up with is a fryer that eliminates the operational friction between equipment and user. Compliance rises, and with it the quality, safety, and savings it was designed to achieve. Perhaps this is the future of the commercial kitchen, a place where anyone can walk in and already know how to operate the most sophisticated cooking equipment in the world.

 

Want to learn more about the revolutionary F5 fryer? Click Here