Reducing Cost and Waste with Effective Catering Management

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Catering Management in a modern, high volume, catering facility is a complex challenge. Providing complete meals in environments such as Hospitals, Nursing Homes, Military camps, Hotels and other catering environments presents unique challenges. In addition to all of the usual food safety and HACCP management issue that apply in any food production environment the catering kitchen has additional challenges in term of issues like;

  • Minimising meal wastage.
  • Planning meal structures and taking end user meal orders.
  • Consolidating meal orders into bulk production jobs for the kitchen staff in a timely manner.
  • Optimising purchasing and ingredient usage in meal production.
  • Linking different elements of the meal ordering and production process into one integrated and paperless system.

The Verify Technologies Catering and Menu Management solution has been designed to specifically address all of key problem areas in a catering management organisation.

The system allows meal orders to be taken on a mobile device (iPad, iPhones, PDA’s, Tablet PC’s etc.,) and automatically calculates portion quantities and ingredient lists for the kitchen staff.

The system will help to dramatically reduce waste and provides the kitchen staff with additional time for meal creation and plating because order information appears instantaneously totalled for the Kitchen staff.

Having all of the stakeholders enter and access data in real time into the catering management system will dramatically improve the effectiveness of the overall process. The system is completely paperless and dynamic which means that changes and modifications can filter through to all areas of the catering process immediately.

Example Application – Hospital Catering Environment

The system will ensure that Ward staff and Kitchen staff spend the minimum amount of time administering the catering process. Wastage in terms of portion sizes and meal consumption can be easily monitored to allow the catering staff to optimise the effectiveness of the meal preparation. Reducing costs and improving the patients experience of the catering service.

Automatic alerts on dietary issues

The menu system allows menu items to be tagged for suitability issues such as Celiac diets, Diabetic diets, Soft meal diets, etc. If a patient has been flagged within the system as having a sensitivity to any issue (e.g. if the patient is Celiac) then the system will automatically flag any item that is incompatible with this sensitivity and the Ward staff will not be able to order that item for the patient.