Cold Food Quality Case Study

At SVUH, most food quality problems originate or are noticed during receiving. A good example being: A box of 24 salmon cost €30 (Karen, 2012). Twelve boxes are ordered and delivered per week for in annual contract but received with 22 salmon pieces per box. The loss is €1560 per year on one ingredient. This affects food costs, patient food quality and chance of modernising. The same applies to quality; there is no guarantee that the food displayed by suppliers in their marketing for hospital contracts will be exactly the same quality throughout the supply period unless proven. Food and materials are checked for quality, quantity, and price and entered into daily records when receiving. Ireland and E.U hospitals have a food safety program that identifies and controls food safety hazards in the handling of food in food operations. Cold foods are check for the receiving temperature to make sure they are within the correct fresh

Patients are often not happy with food appearance (Gonçalves et al (2009). Hospital food production is very complex (Hwang and Sneed, 2009) with a lot of underlying factors such policies, procedures, menu design; kitchen size; equipment/facilities; various cooking methods, employee skills and meal delivery influencing the quality of the food. At SVUH, we use cook-serve production method while most hospital uses cook-chill or cook-freeze methods because of their convenience. However, as confirmed by Assaf et al. (2008): food production affects patient satisfaction and hospital costs. Finance; staff skills and training are important for the production of quality food services. Recruiting skilled and experienced staff and training them has improved food production in many hospitals (Cousins et al, 2011). Different hospitals adopt and develop different food production systems across Europe (Payne-Palacio and Theis,