Buyer Guide on choosing the right noodle machine for restaurants

In Japan, the competition of ramen shops has gotten severe to the point where it is difficult to stand out just with unique soups alone. Many ramen shops that have relied on noodle factories for their noodle supplies have increasing start making their own noodles to be unique. This has been a way of surviving and even thriving in a severely competitive market of ramen in Japan.

At Yamato, we have helped thousands of such ramen shops and businesses start their own noodle production. Because there are different needs and goals, what we suggest they start varies. In this article, we summarized a buyer’s guide for restaurants when choosing a noodle machine that fits their needs and goals, based on hundreds of cases we have helped over the past 40 years. After reading this article, you have a good understanding of how you can pick the right noodle equipment for your restaurant’s homemade noodle project.

When we start something new and what we have never done, there is always a risk involved and chance to make mistakes. As this potentially requires a great deal of investment from your business, you want to get it right from the 1st time. To achieve this, the surest way you can do is to ask someone who has done it before for pitfalls and tips. Luckily, at Yamato, we have many machine users across the world who can tell their experiences, mistakes, and probably regrets.

First, restaurants are busy, very busy with a lot of different tasks daily. Depending on how much of what they serve in house, the number of workers available (usually labor is scarce), adding another daily task seems impossible. Second, usually restaurants operate in limited space. When considering making their own noodles, they must consider having some space for operation, which may be difficult to think about in the already packed space. Third, this new initiative creates additional costs. The initial investment, which comes from equipment, construction, etc. Running costs, labor, ingredients, utilities, etc. they didn’t have before.

Considering these new costs and obstacles, we really want to think about if in-house noodle production would really make sense for your business. We want to weigh pros and cons of homemade noodle business for your business, given your current conditions, ideas, and goals for the near future.

When starting anything new and launching a new initiative, we want to see our future selves. We want to look into at least 3 years in the future. We want to start with an end in mind. We don’t know if things are going to turn out exactly the way we imagine. But we want to have a direction of where we want to be in 12 months, 24 months, and 36 months. Then we can plan for things that take a long time to materialize. For example, construction of a place where we produce noodles may take a year to complete. We can start small now at the current small location and move to a bigger space in one year. But by then, we also want to have a bigger equipment ready. Let’s say that this equipment takes 6 months for delivery. That means, we want to decide and place an order on this machine in 6 months from now.

Anyway, so, it is critical that we ask ourselves the question of where we want to be in 12 months and beyond at the beginning. We can work backward to make detailed plans towards the milestone. If our average daily sales volume exceeds 1,000 servings of fresh noodles in 12 months, the current daily capacity of 500 servings/day won’t be able to catch up or there’s going to be excessive overtime hours. It is usually a tradeoff between the number of labor hours and equipment performance, which would mean a bigger investment. We want to calculate the cost of making noodles, based on our numbers. (e.g.: our labor cost, ingredient costs, utilities, machine performance, daily sale volume, serving size, the cost of buying one serving of noodles from external vendors) At Yamato, we can calculate the cost of production based on your numbers. Please feel free to ask us to do the calculations for you.

Having considered your production needs for the current situation, 12-month-plan, and beyond, we can start thinking about your noodle production in more details.

If we do not have information on these variables about your noodles (especially hydration ratio, etc.), we can ask questions like these. What kind of noodle texture do we want in our noodles? What kind of soup are we coupling our noodles with? What kind of noodle dish are we serving? Your answers to these questions may determine the variables. For example, if you are paring your noodles with a tonkotsu soup (heavy and viscous stock made of pork bones), typically the paired noodles are thin and hard, which tell us a range of noodle sizes, hydration ratio, and ingredients used. Determining your noodle specifications upfront allows us to pick a proper noodle making machine for your restaurant. And your sales volumes over time give us how we want to grow with a proper equipment plan for the next few years.

Another thing we want to consider in-house noodle production as a restaurant is how we sell an excessive production capacity in case we cannot use up all the capacity in our own consumption. If we are selling only 200 servings a day when we have a maximum daily production capacity of 500 servings, then we may want to sell out the excessive capacity. This is where an idea of micro noodle factory business comes. We have a choice of extending our business from restaurant business. We can start retail or wholesale business by marketing and selling our noodles. Local restaurants and/or retailers may be interested in selling or have demands for such craft noodles freshly made.

By having your own noodle production system, you can have a choice of converting your business into a hybrid of restaurant and retail/wholesale. There is always a market for delicious noodles freshly made in your neighborhood. But again, we want to consider your current resources, the profits you can make out of this business, and a long-term effect this business may have on your main business, which is restaurant.

As a starting point, you can check how much it would cost you to start your own noodle production, how much you could save or lose by starting this project and analyze both pros and cons of your own homemade noodle business. 

We can help you do that. Please feel free to contact us for any questions and how you can start your own noodle production for your restaurant business.

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