Working in partnership with Salford Royal Hospital, apetito’s Training and Operations team successfully managed the handover, met patients’ complex dietary needs, provided onsite training and improved productivity.

Patients need meals. All day. Every day. Salford Royal Hospital relied on apetito to transition over to cook-freeze catering smoothly and seamlessly. apetito managed every aspect of the handover with the catering team - from improving the menu range and providing options to suit specialist dietary needs, to enhancing mealtime service and overall efficiency.

“The kitchen was failing; we’d kind of put plasters on things. Part of the tender process was to go and see suppliers to learn more about what they do and how they do it. 

“We looked at three providers, apetito being one of them, and out of the three, apetito was the best. Even how they treated staff became apparent, treating them far better than the other suppliers. So, we looked at the options, went to tender, and apetito was the preferred provider.”

“A team of apetito employees came in from different backgrounds, and just picked us up and dragged us along, because as the changeover happens you have to feed these patients. There is nothing else you can do, the day you change over, these patients still need feeding! And it did feel like we didn’t really know what we were doing, so without the support from apetito, it would definitely not have happened as well as it did.”

“After the changeover day, the support from apetito then continued. They didn’t just go home, but came back the next day. It was really difficult, but without that support it wouldn’t have happened, or it wouldn’t have been as smooth. Even now, the support that we receive, wasn’t there before. The support is really high up in terms of what we need, and what keeps us moving forward - whether it’s improving productivity, or training in plate presentation.”

“So from the changeover we got a rebuild of the kitchen. As a Trust, they were able to reduce the floor space by about a third, so they could give that back to clinical,” Julie explains. 

“To cook the amount of meals for an 830 bed hospital, twice a day, it was great big heavy bags of things, which does take a toll on staff. Since changing to apetito, there is so much difference to staff. It’s a cleaner system now, they’re not wet round the middle, they don’t have wet feet, there’s not as much washing up involved from our side, and they’re not having to lift the weights that they were lifting. 

“Just to put something in perspective, we’ve got one of our members of staff that was really struggling with an injury that came and said, ‘I think I’m going to have to retire, I really am struggling this much with the amount of work we are doing.’ We changed over to apetito and about three months ago I passed the kitchen to hear somebody singing, and as I stuck my head in it was this member of staff. So just the toll from the body is gone now, and it is a lot more staff friendly than before.”