Lean in Food Industry

This is Hormoz Mogarei, Get Kaizened Incorporated. The question is whether or not lean is applicable in the food industry.

Last year I visited a food catering company for airlines in Northern California. I noticed that people were working non-stop, regularly preparing food, different types for the different airlines because flights were coming in and leaving on a regular basis.

I was asked to improve the quality of their work and the biggest problem seemed to be mixing the veggie and non-vegetarian food and as a result, although they were working in a very, very short lead time industry, only a few hours they have to prepare the food for every airline, very picky first class and business customers and very difficult kind of work knowing exactly what components of the food they had to put on their tray before they cover it. They had a lot of mistakes. They would often mix the veggie and non-veggie food and as a result the customer on the plane didn't have a choice to stop the plane and exchange the food.

So they would either go hungry or they would have to eat something that they hadn't ordered. After discussing it with team members, I reminded them that the concept should be very simple, quick and inexpensive because that's the definition of kaizen.

The brainstorm revealed that if we changed the color of the aluminum foil, for veggie and non-veggie food, separate the food and trays by the color and then do the final inspection to ensure that veggie food are in fact veggies, we would be able to improve the quality and reduce the defects. As a result of making that simple change, different color aluminum foil for different foods, you are able to reduce the quality defects by about 60 percent.

Other discussion was -- which wasn't implemented but it was mentioned that perhaps by the weight of their trays, we can automate and the lighter which was normally the veggie tray could be separated by the machine. There would be no way to mix veggie and non-veggie food.

You see that simple change like the color of aluminum foil or perhaps a little bit more detailed change, weighing each tray and deciding what the tray content is based on the weight, we will be able to eliminate a big problem for the food catering company and for the airline industry.

If you are in the food industry, I highly recommend you to consider the components of your process and see exactly how you can improve it, even if it is by a very tiny margin. That is exactly what kaizen is, improving regularly and incrementally. Until next video, so long.

Key Terms:
Lean in Food Industry
Lean Food
Lean
Lean Management
Lean Manufacturing
Kaizen
Lean Application
Application of Lean
Food Industry