West Suffolk Hospital. Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk, UK.

“Customers love the theatre of seeing food being cooked in such a high tech appliance like the RATIONAL SelfCookingCenter®. Thanks to the self-cleaning system, it always looks sparkling.” - Brodrick Pooley, catering manager

Popular for freshness and quality.

West Suffolk Hospital is a vibrant, friendly and accessible hospital set in a 19-hectare parkland site on the edge of Bury St Edmunds. It has 450 beds and serves a population of around 275,000. The West Suffolk Hospital prides itself on the quality of its food – nearly all of which is freshly cooked in-house. With three meals a day for the patients, plus feeding the hospital’s staff and visitors, work is demanding for the 14 chefs and 57 catering staff.

The main kitchen and the busy Time Out restaurant, used by staff and visitors, have RATIONAL combi ovens, which cook most of the food. Recently the hospital decided it needed to expand the menu and speed up the customer experience in the restaurant, “the RATIONAL SelfCookingCenter® is the perfect solution”, says catering manager Brodrick Pooley. “We can cook loads of different foods in it and it’s very fast.”

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“The RATIONAL SelfCookingCenter® is the perfect solution for us.”

Brodrick Pooley, catering manager

The RATIONAL Solution.

The busy Time Out restaurant is open 8 am till 8 pm and serves around 300 meals a day. The menu is the same as is served to patients, plus a choice of specials of the day and snack meals. A lot of the food used to be cooked in the main kitchen, which sometimes caused delays. Now more and more food can be put through the new RATIONAL in the restaurant. “The freshness and quality of our food is what makes our catering so popular,” says Brodrick.

When the new combi oven was delivered a RATIONAL expert came to help Brodrick and head chef Steve Landells programme it with their own recipes. “All the restaurant catering staff were involved in the programming process, to make sure they were happy with the cooking results. They don’t have to keep checking the food, the RATIONAL tells them when it’s ready. And they love the fact it produces really good quality meals for their customers, at the touch of a button. A batch of sausages takes about 8 minutes, compared to 15 or 20 in conventional ovens”, says Brodrick.

Benefits:
  • iLevelControl:
    Tells the user which different foods can be cooked together at the same time and intelligently controls the cooking time for each rack. It means everything is cooked to perfection, every time.
  • Efficient CareControl:
    Enhances efficiency by detecting the build up of cooking residues and suggest the appropriate cleaning level saving up to 40% in terms of energy, water and chemicals.
  • Safety:
    Guaranteed hygiene standards and HACCP records.
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