How to plan a restaurant conveyor layout: choosing a circuit shape, sizing the track to your room, setting seat pitch, and keeping kitchen access and service aisles clear. These are the decisions that determine whether an installation still works on a busy Friday night, long after the finish has been chosen.

A conveyor is fixed infrastructure. Once it is built, moving it costs roughly as much as building it, so the layout decision deserves more time than the finish decision. These are the factors that determine whether the installation works on a busy Friday night.

Choose the circuit shape

Straight run. The simplest and cheapest. It suits narrow rooms and counter-service formats, but a straight belt reaches fewer seats per metre of track than a loop, because guests can only sit along one or both sides of a line.

Oval or racetrack loop. The standard revolving-sushi format. It puts the maximum number of seats in contact with a continuous circuit and lets a plate return to every seat at a predictable interval.

U-shape and L-shape. Used when the room is irregular or when the conveyor has to wrap around a structural core. They work well in rooms with columns, because the track can be routed around the obstacle instead of through it.

Composite layouts. Two loops, or a loop with a spur into a private room. Worth considering above roughly 120 m² of dining floor, where a single circuit becomes too long for a plate to come round in a reasonable time.

Size the track to the room

Measure the usable floor area rather than the total area: subtract the kitchen, the entrance, the washrooms and any circulation you cannot give up. Then mark the fixed obstacles — columns, load-bearing walls, service risers — because they dictate where the track can and cannot go.

Circuit length determines rotation time, which is the number your guests actually feel. A short loop with a high seat count means congestion at the loading point; a long loop with few seats means a guest waits too long for a dish to come round. Set a target rotation time with your supplier and check it against the length you have room for before signing anything.

Set the seat pitch

Seat pitch is the counter edge allocated to one guest, and it is the dimension most often squeezed. Each seat needs enough room for a place setting, a stack of plates, a drink, and comfortable reach to the passing belt. On a hot pot installation the pitch is set by the individual cooker, not by the plate, and it is significantly wider.

Compressing pitch to add covers is a false economy. Guests who cannot reach the belt comfortably stop taking plates from it, which removes the entire point of the installation, and correcting it afterwards means rebuilding the counter.

Keep the service routes clear

Three routes have to work independently: the guest route to each seat, the staff route along the counter for clearing and topping up, and the kitchen route for loading. If any two of them cross, you will feel it during peak service. Plan the loading point close to the kitchen pass and out of the guest circulation, and give staff a route that does not require reaching across a seated guest.

Aisle width is not negotiable either. It has to satisfy your local fire and accessibility rules, and it has to allow a server to pass behind a seated guest without contact. Check both before the layout is fixed.

Plan for services and for later expansion

Decide early where power, water and drainage enter the counter, because they have to be inside the counter body before it is closed. If you expect to add an express lane or a second loop later, reserve the route and the ceiling or counter height now — retrofitting a lane into a finished installation is far more disruptive than building the provision in at the start.

Finally, ask for a dimensioned drawing rather than a description. A serious manufacturer will return a layout drawing from your floor plan, showing circuit length, seat count, loading point and service routes, and that drawing is what you should be comparing between quotations. Review installed conveyor layouts.

Send us your floor plan and we will return a layout proposal with circuit length, seat count and service routes. See the equipment range.