Blue C Sushi chefs “commission” plates, or enter them into the RFID system, before placing them on the conveyor belt.

The RFID tags, scanned by a reader beneath the conveyor belt, serve several purposes. They enable sushi chefs to pull plates off the belt when they are past their sell-by time. They let each restaurant track sales of sushi, meaning chefs can increase or decrease production as demand dictates. Both benefits lead to a third: control of food waste, and therefore food cost.

RFID, or radio frequency identification, technology is “a real operational advantage” for its high business utility and its relative invisibility to customers, says Blue C Sushi co-founder James Allard. “It gives us the opportunity to provide them what they want, when they want it,” Allard says. “It's not customer-facing unless customers know what to look for.” Because Seattle is such a high-tech town, plenty do: “Servers have to understand [the technology] because we get questions about it,” Allard says.

The technology makes sense, given Blue C's service model. Customers are seated around the conveyor belt, which moves plates of sushi ($1.50 to $5.25 plate) and Japanese side dishes such as gomae (cold spinach with sesame sauce). Servers take orders for drinks and “non-belt” items such as miso soup and frozen desserts, while customers take the plates they want from the conveyor belt. The colored plate bands help servers tally the checks.

The RFID system cost $100,000 to install at the first Blue C unit and $50,000 per store after that.

He and Rosen revisited RFID in late 2006 during a conversation with Microsoft about that company's BizTalk platform. Allard says Microsoft didn't understand how RFID could be used in a sushi restaurant, until executives from the Redmond, Wash.-based software giant had lunch at Blue C Sushi.

The two used Microsoft software, hardware from Everett, Wash.-based Intermec and a proprietary program written by Seattle-based Kikata, which had also written the bar-code program for Blue C. The process, including assigning codes to each dish and installing four kitchen monitors, RFID antennas and an RFID reader on the conveyor belt, took five or six months, Allard explains.

The RFID program cost $100,000 to install at the first Blue C. Subsequent stores cost $50,000 each because of the descending prices for the technology. Due to the savings in food costs, the return on the investment for the equipment is less than a year, Allard says.

The rollout was smooth, with only minor adjustments. One involved the “commissioning” of the plates, or making sure the plated sushi was entered into the system before it was put on the conveyor belt. The program began with each sushi station receiving the entire commissioning menu; it was adjusted so the primary screens showed only the sushi made at each station.

The trickiest part, Allard says, was getting employees to adopt the new technology. “Many have been sushi chefs for 20 years, and they have a set way of doing things,” which does not include the extra step of plugging RFID numbers into a computer, Allard says. “They'd look at us quizzically and say, 'why are we doing this?'” Even after explaining the business benefits of the system, it took the kitchen two months to “get people really committed,” he says.

While Seattle health codes permit sushi to stay on the conveyor belt for four hours, Blue C pulls unsold sushi after an hour.

Kikata trained one employee in each Blue C restaurant to add to or delete menu items from the system. The chain sometimes asks for help adding features such as data reports. And, “if a chef accidentally unplugs something, we support them,” says Todd Emerson, Kikata principal and founder.

Now into its second year with the system, Blue C is reaping benefits and discovering new ones. Food costs are down about 2.4 percent. Before the system was installed, “we didn't have a sense of what to make or not,” Allard says. “Now we know, because we have a history of demand.” That history also leads to less food waste because chefs are yanking and discarding less uneaten sushi.

An RFID scanner under the conveyor belt keeps a constant record of how long each plate has been on the belt.

Allard says the concept plans to expand RFID use with handheld mobile scanners that will let servers calculate the bill by scanning each sushi plate tableside. The software is ready, but the POS system needs to be updated, Emerson says.

Scanning the plates will render their colored bands obsolete. But the plates, which take their colors from those of the Toyko subway system lines, aren't going anywhere. They're too integral a part of the Blue C Sushi concept, says Corey Beebe, manager of the 72-seat University Village location.

“The plates give people a different kind of dining—more innovative dining,” he says.

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