Paper tickets or a display? The right answer depends on how busy your kitchen gets and how many stations you run.
Every order has to reach whoever is cooking. There are two ways to do that, and restaurants often pick the wrong one for their size.
The printer
A kitchen printer produces a paper ticket for each order. It is cheap, instantly understood by any cook, and works without anyone learning anything new.
Where it struggles: paper gets wet, greasy and lost. Tickets fall behind counters. In a rush, a stack of paper gives no sense of what is urgent, and nobody can tell how long an order has been waiting. Reprinting a lost ticket means going back to the till.
The screen
A kitchen display shows live orders, sorted by station and by how long they have been waiting. Nothing gets lost, nothing gets wet, and the kitchen can see at a glance what is late.
It also lets you route properly - drinks to the bar, starters to one station, mains to another - and it times courses so a table is served together.
Where it struggles: it costs more up front, needs power and a mount, and older cooks sometimes prefer paper for the first week.
Which one for your kitchen
| If your kitchen | Choose | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Serves under ~50 covers a day, one station | Printer | Simple, cheap, enough |
| Gets a real rush at lunch or evening | Screen | Timing and priority become the problem, not printing |
| Has separate bar and food stations | Screen | Routing is the whole point |
| Does long cook times - choma, roasts | Screen | Items need to start early and finish together |
| Is delivery-heavy | Screen | Orders stack fast and cold food is a bad review |
You can run both
Plenty of restaurants keep a printer for a paper backup and use a screen day to day. If the screen ever fails you simply carry on printing. It costs a little more and removes the single point of failure - worth it in a kitchen that cannot stop.
Related reading
See a kitchen screen working
The difference between paper and a screen is most obvious during a rush. Book a demo and we will show you a live kitchen display, or browse printers and displays.
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