The RATIONAL SelfCooking Center^® often pays for itself in less than six months.

Landsberg am Lech, December 2005

When you buy a RATIONAL SelfCooking Center^®, you are not only opting for the world’s most modern cooking technology – you are also choosing to invest in a product that will pay for itself very quickly indeed. Right from day 1 with the SelfCooking Center^®, drastic savings are possible in terms of use of raw materials, energy and wage costs – all factors that help to determine the success or failure of a business.

According to RATIONAL, most business will find it worthwhile to purchase a SelfCooking Center^® once they prepare more than 30 meals per day. At the free TeamCooking Live seminars that RATIONAL runs across the country, every interested party has the opportunity to have the potential savings calculated for his individual operation.

The potential is massive, particularly with meat products. The meat cooks very gently in the optimum climate of the SelfCooking Center^®, so it remains particularly tender and juicy. This not only clearly increases the quality, but it also reduces roasting losses by up to 50% compared to traditional cooking methods. Quite aside from the increased customer satisfaction, large-scale RATIONAL customers save massive amounts every year. At the Niagara Falls Casino in Canada, for example, they spend over € 300,000 on beef every year. While the use of raw materials can be greatly reduced for meat, and also for poultry, working with the SelfCooking Center^® means crossing fat off the shopping list almost entirely. Even deep-fried products such as French fries are prepared with no fat whatsoever, so a restaurant that prepares just 100 meals per day will save around € 1,000 on fat alone. And this doesn’t even take into account the costs of cleaning the fryer and the greasy kitchen.

Although modern control technology and shorter preheat times also allow energy costs to be reduced by up to 60%, it is the wage costs that allow the SelfCooking Center^® to pay for itself after just a few months for many customers. It is extremely simple to use – “Just select the food and that’s it” - so it saves a lot of time in terms of training. And the fact that it is no longer necessary to watch the fully automatic cooking processes means that staff can be used much more effectively. If for no other reason than that staff can be sent home earlier because the RATIONAL SelfCooking Center^® cleans itself overnight – fully automatically – the enormous potential savings are clear even to the owners of small restaurants.

Today, the SelfCooking Center^® is an absolutely essential feature in many community catering operations and for large banquets, The rigorous separation of production and serving using cook & chill methods allows productivity increases that wouldn’t have even been dreamed of just a few years ago. At BASF AG in Ludwigshafen, the world’s largest chemical group, they have produced “around 10,000 meals every day with considerably fewer staff”, as Heinrich Rottmüller, head of corporate catering at BASF, proudly explains. Executive Chef Martin Heuser from Westin Calgary in Canada is also totally inspired by the investment in his RATIONAL banqueting system. “By spreading the work over several days, we have made massive savings, and our investment in the SelfCooking Center^® has paid for itself in much less than one year.”