The Hilton Hotel in Sydney says the latest new dishwashing system it installed earlier this year has already paid for itself because of its effectiveness.
Chief steward at the hotel, Brett Lake, says the new system had drastically reduced the amount of time staff had to spend hand polishing the vast amounts of glassware needed for events at the hotel. And along the way Lake says the hotel has set a new benchmark in Australia for dishwashing performance in a commercial kitchen.
Lake says the elimination of hand polishing was the main reason behind the decision by the Hilton to begin looking for new dishwashing equipment.
“[Manual polishing] represented a major cost for us when it cam e to preparing equipment for a function,” says Lake. “If we were doing 700 for dinner with four glasses for each person and each glass taking around 20 to 40 seconds to polish that adds up to a lot of money. We were spending around $750,000 a year on hand polishing. One of the previous places I worked was spending $1.2m a year.”
He said the system also had to be low maintenance and heavy duty enough to last for ten years.
The dishwashing operation installed at the Hilton includes a Winterhalter MTseries dishwasher from Comcater. Plus a key part of the system is a water softening system and a reverse osmosis system requested by the Hilton to ensure the greatest purity of the water being used in the rinse cycle of the dishwashing process, to ensure a better result. It’s believed to be the first system like it in Australia.
Lake says the new system had delivered a significant reduction in hand polishing of its glassware.
“We’ve found that where the glass is in contact with the rack they are still a bit wet and so require a quick dry around the rim,” says Lake. “But that’s about half a second as opposed to 40 seconds. And the results we are getting are improving the more glasses that go through the system.”
The cost of the system was around $100,000 but Lake says it had paid for itself fairly soon after installation in late January this year. “It really paid for itself in the first month and a half,” he says.