Care homes host for a variety of dietary requirements. Healthy residents who have a good appetite can enjoy a balanced healthy diet, but on the other hand, many care homes have residents with support needs or health conditions that affect their food and drink intake. It is important to ensure when you provide food and drink, it’s enjoyable, nutritious, and accessible to maintain health and well-being.
In a care home, all staff have an equally important role in ensuring residents have positive food experiences. Care homes are currently missing a third of the needed staff, and more than one in four have closed their doors to new admissions because of staff shortages*. For catering, it's crucial to create a care home kitchen that can help smaller teams quickly generate the volume of meals needed.
The leading luxury many care home owners and managers are missing is time. Care home catering kitchens must commonly prepare three meals a day for various dietary requirements and daily snacks. Multifunctional kitchen equipment that combines commercial ovens and steamers can come in handy, which can help cut down cooking preparation time.
While life is returning to normal post-pandemic, care homes are still spending big money on PPE, testing, and extra cleaning. Alongside this, 2022 has been a massive rise in the cost of ingredients and energy. It's essential to ensure your equipment is energy efficient and you are not using more than you need. You can reduce the amount of equipment/energy you need to prepare your care home meals by using smart ovens and cooking systems.
With fewer staff, increased cost pressure and increased demands for quality, RATIONAL's iKitchen could be the perfect solution to create a smaller kitchen that can make fresh, balanced, nutritional meals. The iKitchen system can cover 90% of all conventional cooking applications in two units: iCombi Pro and iVario Pro . These cooking systems can replace traditional commercial catering ovens, with the ability to steam food, locking in nutrients and vitamins essential to providing care home residents with nutritionally beneficial meals. The iCombi Pro and iVario Pro have a smaller footprint, saving you space, using up to 40% less energy, increasing productivity with intelligent assistants, and delivering consistent and uniform results.
Care homes must cater to residents' nutritional needs, but changes must be made to keep the doors open to all who need to live there. Get in touch with the team at RATIONAL , who can guide you on the best catering equipment for your care home's requirements.
Discover all the possibilities that the iVario Pro and iCombi Pro can bring to your kitchen. Register for one of our FREE 10-minute webinars now: