A kitchen display system (KDS) is a screen in a restaurant's kitchen that shows each order from every channel, in the order in which it should be cooked. It replaces the paper kitchen order tickets, or KOTs, that used to be printed at the counter and pinned up above the stove.
Orders reach the KDS from two places. Orders from the tables come from the restaurant POS, when a waiter presses Send. Orders from the delivery apps come through the online order aggregator. The KDS puts them all in one queue.
It then does three things. First, it splits each order by cooking station, so the tandoor cook sees only the rotis and kebabs, and the dessert cook sees only the desserts. Second, it sorts the tickets by the time each dish must be ready. For a table, that depends on the course. For a delivery order, it depends on when the rider will arrive. Third, it times every ticket. A ticket changes colour when it has waited too long. When a cook finishes a dish, he taps the ticket, and it disappears from his screen.
For instance, a restaurant in Hyderabad has 14 open orders at 8:30 p.m. on a Saturday. A delivery order arrives for one chicken biryani and two double ka meetha, and the rider is due in 18 minutes. The KDS sends the biryani to the biryani station and the desserts to the dessert station. At the biryani station, it places the ticket third in the queue, behind two tables whose main course is due sooner. Tickets turn yellow after 10 minutes and red after 15 minutes. The biryani is ready at 12 minutes. The cook taps the ticket, and the screen at the packing counter shows the order as complete. The order is marked ready for the rider.
Why not use paper? Paper slips get lost and are hard to read. They cannot show how long an order has waited. And they leave no record of how long each dish took. A KDS keeps that record. The restaurant's average cooking time for each dish also helps the delivery app with delivery time prediction.
A KDS matters even more in a cloud kitchen, which may cook for several brands at once. There, each ticket also shows the brand name, so the food goes into the right box.