Cygnet Chef Development Days create opportunities for our chefs to learn innovative cooking methods and techniques to take back to site, improving the food on offer for both the people we care for and also our colleagues.
This particular Chef Development Day was all about cost-saving initiatives, bringing awareness to Chefs that the most expensive ingredients are not always the most appropriate for the recipes we create. We also looked at how our Chefs can best utilise food products using leftovers in creative ways to help reduce food waste.
In addition to 15 Cygnet chefs other attendees included members of the Cygnet Procurement team, service users, and Experts by Experience.
The day commenced with introductions around the room, including introductions from our Brakes Account Management Team. They also spoke about the Chef Whatsapp group, which was formed off the back of a previous Development Day as a way of improving communication between our Chefs, sharing initiatives, ideas and all things positive associated with food.
Next, Jack Mills and Marc Tough from the Cygnet Procurement team spoke to the group about the purpose of the day, which was around cost-saving initiatives.
To paint a perspective on Cygnet costs associated with food, Jack and Marc presented relevant facts around Cygnet’s annual food spend, meals produced, per day, food waste, authorised food suppliers available, and our authorised buying list with Brakes, in which we have approximately 3,000 products available that have been carefully selected to suit hospital and residential home environments.
The key message of the day was that small incremental changes when swapping ingredients for a particular recipe can result in significant cost savings, and that expensive branded products are not always the best tasting. As of way of demonstrating this, Chefs would be sampling different products throughout the day. Each product would be decanted and simply labelled “A”, “B” or “C”.
The idea was for the Chefs to taste multiple options of an expensive branded product, an average cost product and a cheaper/overlooked product to see whether they could taste the difference, and provide feedback on their preference.
Following the above, we were very fortunate to hear feedback from a service user from Cygnet Fountains who presented feedback to the Chef group on the importance of food and how food impacts their morale on site. Hearing feedback directly from service users has become pivotal on the Chef Development Days.
Brakes Development Chef, Danny Silcock, then led a demonstration on how to best utilise ingredients to minimise food waste, producing further cost-savings as well as improving resource efficiency. The group split up into four teams and were tasked to work together to build different recipes. Our Service User & Expert by Experience from The Fountains also got involved with the cooking alongside the Chefs. Whole Chickens were one of the ingredients demonstrated, and our Chefs were tasked with dissecting the whole chicken to create other recipes such as chicken soup, chicken burritos, chicken carbonara and seasoned chicken drums & wings. Cauliflower was another ingredient used for utilisation. The Chefs didn’t disappoint! Each of the dishes created looked amazing, and tasted even better as the group consumed each recipe for lunch.
After lunch, the afternoon kicked off with an introduction and presentation from Andy Burrill, Cygnet’s recently appointed Catering Quality, Audit & Compliance Manager. Andy spoke about multiple projects and initiatives he is currently working on to improve catering quality standards across the business.
Following Andy’s presentation, it was back to cooking with Danny Silcock. In this session, the group focused on price mitigation, sampling different products and ingredients from different food categories. These were: tea and coffee, croissants, minced meat, ketchup, mayonnaise, butter, gravy and strawberry mousse. Danny had prepared options of samples which ranged from expensive to cost-effective. All of which were unlabelled. The Chefs were tasked with tasting each one and voting for their favourite. The idea behind sampling different ingredients was so that Procurement could collate all the votes and present the savings back to the Chefs by day closure. As soon as the votes were collated, there were some very interesting results which further highlighted that expensive brands are not always the best tasting!
At the end of the day prizes were awarded to chefs in various categories, including; Best Team, Best Tasting Dish, and Best Presented Dish. Euan Atkinson, Expert by Experience also won the “Chef Development Day Award” for his hard work and contributions to helping the chefs with cooking.
A big thanks to all who took part making the day a huge success.