Buying in bulk
Star product for Nicky Smith was Taylor Freezer's new Flavor Burst, which injects flavouring and colouring into soft ice-cream or frozen yogurt as it emerges from the ice-cream dispenser.
The syrup unit carries eight syrups in foil bags (from a choice of 12) and the choice of flavour is controlled by a touch panel. Each bag gives about 700 doses, and the flavouring adds, typically, 4p to the cost of a cone. Cleaning is simple, and is operated from the control panel.
Smith also admired the Taylor Express Oven, a forced-air cooker that can be used for pizza, sweet pastries, fish, jacket potatoes and many other foods - even sweet and savoury cooked at the same time.
"This could be used in a small pub, or a tea room that wants to do a little hot food, and it could be great for hotel room service," said Smith.
Although we liked the Taylor Freezer products, the company was reticent about giving us its prices.
On the Fast Food Systems stand, Smith admired the Revolva Hot Dog Grill. This unit has only two moving parts, the motor, and the arm which keeps the hot dogs revolving. The heating system brings the unit up to just above 100ºC and holds it at that level. This machine comes in two sizes, priced at £650 and £750.
"The vertical conveyor lets the fat run off, which is good, though I'm a bit worried about frozen burgers being cooked so quickly," Smith said. "The hot dog machine is nice and easy to clean, because it has very few moving parts."
Alcatel Business Systems was showing its new Alcatel 7800 touch-screen point of sale system. Smith was impressed: "This could be adapted for any outlet, whether it's a hotel with a front-desk system or a restaurant with stock control. It's very fast."
The tiny Piltan baking system shown by Sepand bakes pizza dough, pitta bread and other dough-based products in a few minutes. The cooker turns out up to 90 pieces of pitta bread per hour. We saw a pizza being produced from scratch in about two minutes.
"In pizza restaurants the crucial thing is how hot they can keep their ovens," said Smith. "This is reasonably priced at £170, but you can only do one portion at a time so it's difficult to see what sort of unit would be able to use it."
On the Servequip stand we looked at Hot'n'Crispy, a branded self-service deep-fat fryer, which is finding demand in petrol stations. Customers buy a frozen meal - such as sausages and chips, or chicken nuggets and chips - in a carton, pour the contents into a chute at the top of the unit and press the appropriate button to cook the dish. After three minutes or so the cooked meal is ejected from another chute into the original container.
"The built-in safety factor looks pretty good, which is important in an unsupervised environment," said Smith.
Chips and chunks of ice are now out - the thing to offer is "nuggets" of ice. Hubbard's Scotsman ice-maker delivers the smaller pieces of ice familiar in US cocktail bars but only usually seen here in leisure outlets, for chilling soft drinks. The smallest model of Scotsman ice maker costs from about £3,000.
