Chef prepared meals
We’re dedicated to providing quality, freshly cooked, balanced menus and the highest food safety standards to our residents.
Excellent meal experience
It’s not just individual food preferences the kitchen teams can cater for. Our colleagues are committed to ensuring they meet the resident’s nutritional requirements and provide an excellent meal experience.
All our care home kitchens have catering manuals which assure that the standards expected are clear for the team and offers advice on how to operate a quality catering service.
It’s really important to us that the head of the catering team visits a new resident to complete a nutritional assessment form which includes likes, dislikes, special dietary requirements and anything else the team may need to know.
We are also able to safely provide meals for residents that require a specialised meal as directed by Specific Meal Descriptors (Mince and Moist, Pureed, Liquidised etc.). Adaptive crockery and cutlery is also available for residents that require this.
Our commitment to food safety
At MHA, we want to guarantee food safety with regular audits completed that focus on factors like customer satisfaction, kitchen safety, food safety and IDDSI (International Dysphagia Diet Standardisation Initiative).
We also have regular visits from Environmental Health Office (EHO) that give each home a score. Food hygiene ratings for each home are available to view on the care home’s dedicated webpage.
Improving quality and standards
To help us achieve the highest catering standards, we employ chef coaches across our care homes. Chef coaches provide additional support to the home managers, chefs and cooks giving advice and support on food preparation, food service and menu design.
Each chef coach dedicates time each month to visit homes within their area to help with the training of new colleagues and to undertake compliance monitoring of food safety and quality standards. They also produce an action plan specific to the home and offer any recommendations for improvement.
Chef coaches are kept up to date with any new food developments and have access to a wealth of information.
Working in partnership
We work with Kafoodle - a food tech system that enables kitchens to manage their ingredients, recipes, allergen information and recipes all in one space. We are collecting recipes from local chefs and our residents’ relatives so we can offer more varied and specialist menus for residents on our three-month menu cycle.
We know that food is important to our residents so to maintain our nutritional knowledge base all homes, colleagues are members of the following organisations:
- Vegetarian for Life
- Diabetes UK
- Alzheimer’s Society
- Coeliac UK
We also work alongside many professional associations like NACC (National Association of Care Caterers), CIEH, (Chartered Institute of Environmental Health) and NAPA (National Activity providers association).