Royal United Hospitals Bath. Bath, UK.

“We’ve won the Trust’s team of the month and team of the year awards for our local food provision. We’ve also been nominated for a NHS sustainability award. The RATIONAL equipment has enabled us to go further, with a reduction in water of around 50% on our kitchen usage and a saving in energy consumption.” - Philip Watson, Head of Facilities

Versatile and multifunctional.

The Royal United Hospitals Bath NHS Foundation Trust (RUH) serves around 2,000 meals a day to patients, staff and visitors. The kitchens are very busy environments, with lots of bulk cooking based on locally sourced ingredients wherever possible.

“We're very keen to ensure our catering provides nutritional meals to help our patients get better quicker,” says Philip Watson, head of facilities at the RUH. “The challenges of hospital catering at the RUH Bath are to produce a large number of meals at the same time, serving them across a large site,” he adds.

“We need to do that with a good speed of service and in a very cost effective manner. We also need to ensure the quality of cooking is high. RATIONAL appliances have

helped us achieve all this and more, increasing the volume of food we produce in the time available.”

The RUH's main kitchen has five VarioCookingCenters^® and five SelfCookingCenters^®, while the smaller south kitchen, catering for visitors and staff, has one of each appliance.

“As a hospital we use an Assured Safe catering system. With ConnectedCooking we are able to collect HACCP data from all our RATIONAL appliances making everything much easier. This has reduced the amount of paper work we need to produce while giving us far better data for our HACCP process.”

Philip Watson, Head of Facilities.

The RATIONAL solution:

The RUH makes use of RATIONAL ConnectedCooking system, which allows the appliances to be monitored remotely, by managers, chefs and service personnel, via a PC, tablet or even on a smartphone.

“ConnectedCooking also enables us to create and share cooking processes,” says Philip. “We have seasonal menus that change regularly. ConnectedCooking gives us the ability to change and update the automatic cooking processes on multiple appliances.

“RATIONAL has enabled us, as a team to provide an improved service to the patients, visitors and the staff that we feed every day. We’ve managed to do this more efficiently, more effectively, and the support offered by RATIONAL is second to none.”