Ashford and St. Peter's Hospitals Trust is the largest provider of acute hospital services to Surrey residents and employs over 4,000 staff with a turnover exceeding £400 million.
Each hospital hosts thousands of staff, patients and visitors, which all need feeding. Complying with food labelling legislation required a lot of manual searching, calculating and formatting. We interviewed The Trusts Catering Manager, Eimear Jordan, to discover how they use Kafoodle to manage their menu recipes and keep customers safe.
The Problem
Purchasing products that often change and from several suppliers became a time-consuming task. The catering team would have to request information regarding allergens, nutritional values and cost from the supplier and enter it into a system. Values-in-use to add to labels for pre-packed food and menu items had to be calculated and manually added to their menu and labelling system.
The process was not only costing the catering team time but was vulnerable to error.
The Solution
To ease the task of manually importing ingredient data, The Trust installed Kafoodle's purchasing integration. Eliminating the burden of requesting ingredient and product information from their suppliers (Brakes, KFF and IMS).
Using the Kafoodle recipe manager, there is no need for manual calculations. Users select an ingredient from a drop-down menu linked to the ingredient database and input the quantity required and unit of measurement. A recipe's allergens and nutritional and cost value per serving are automatically displayed.
Using Kafoodle's API connection, Ashford and St. Peter's Hospitals can connect their Kafoodle system with LabelLogic Live to create labels for their pre-prepared products effortlessly.
The Results
Ashford and St Peter’s Hospitals NHS Trust only bought its retail catering services in-house during October 2020. Since then, the catering team has transformed the food they offer, concentrating on nutrition and sustainability and implemented new technologies to improve how patients and staff can order food and access recipe information. All these efforts have not gone unnoticed, and in November 2022, Ashford and St Peter’s became the first NHS Trust to be awarded Healthcare Caterer of the Year in the annual Foodservice Cateys Awards.
The catering team now have an ingredient database "full of exact products, not generic items that may have a different value... it's a great allergen and nutritional tracking software", says Eimer. The supplier integration will automatically import items purchased, and if the supplier changes an ingredient's information, the data in Kafoodle will also update. Now, the catering team can rely on continually accurate allergen, nutrition and cost information.
Built-in calculation systems mean "We no longer have to do any maths or manually search for figures", according to Eimear. With the ingredient database storing all the information, the catering teams must decide which ingredients and quantities to use. Kafoodle will create a recipe sheet with all the required information. The costing calculator displays the cost to create the recipe, the cost per serving, any plate costs and a suggested sell price based on a system-set target gross profit.
Kafoodle is an end-to-end system that allows data to flow seamlessly from purchasing to labelling. Saving The Trust time and creating consistent, accurate data the catering team can rely on to help them comply with food legislation. "I can put my menu in the one system, get my labels, and get the information I need and all the costings." Eimer continued, "the link between Kafoodle and LabelLogic Live is a feature I would find hard to live without now. It saves so much time."
Future Goals & Features
Carbon footprint labelling
The NHS aims to reach net zero status by 2045. To help deliver this goal, Ashford and St. Peter's Hospitals Trust is beginning to introduce Kafoodle's carbon labelling feature, allowing the catering team to identify high carbon footprint ingredients and develop a highly sustainable menu.
Digital menus
Currently printing the menu daily, the catering team plans to transform how they provide information to their customers with Kafoodle's digital menus. Customers can use the advanced filtering system to identify suitable items by choosing from the allergen, nutrition and specific ingredient filter options. Customers can access the menu via a web link they plan to post daily on their Twitter feed or by scanning a QR code.
Advice from Catering Manager Eimear Jordan
"Take the time to enter all the information properly at the beginning and spend the time upfront. It will help you get the most out of the system. You won't regret it. Even if you only want it to solve a specific problem, like allergen reporting. If the ingredient data is right, nutrition and costing information is valuable and easy to access. That's why the supplier purchasing integration is so great."
