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Cooking hundreds (or sometimes thousands) of good meals on a budget is a challenge that few kitchens seem to master. The spectrum is surprisingly wide. Some fail utterly while others produce decent fare on a comparable scale and budget. Hospital food and university cafeterias in Germany are pretty comparable in that each have similar budgets per person.
The worst offender that I encountered was a kitchen that only had a very limited set of standard dishes and they still predictable failed to prepare them in exactly the same way each time. Some meals were charred black when they were supposed to be lightly fried, the pizzas had an inedible crust hard as concrete, and so on. And that went on for years...
I also wonder how long the increase in quality in Havelhöhe can last before some beancounter sweeps in and turns the system on its head again based on some pretext. I hope that this never happens, but reality has a way of throwing a wrench into the works every time.
> Cooking hundreds (or sometimes thousands) of good meals on a budget is a challenge that few kitchens seem to master.
the part that confuses me here is the "on a budget part". i attended two very different schools for undergrad, but the meal plan pricing and food quality was very similar. when divided by the total number of swipes, meal plans at both schools cost about $11-13 per meal. the food was not inedible, but it was far worse than an $11 meal would be pretty much anywhere else. both schools offered a la carte cafes run or chains that would take cash and charge about half that for a filling meal that was much tastier (and was able to accommodate pretty much any allergy or dietary restriction).
the universities will always say something like it costs extra to be make enough food to feed everyone without knowing who will dine there on a given day, but don't all restaurants face that problem to an extent? is there some genuine reason why it has to be so expensive/bad, or are they all just taking advantage of the mandatory freshman meal plan to subsidize other parts of operation?
The extra cost may be due to labor if the university is unionized.
The college cafeteria has to deal with, at least, the intention or pretense of making something nutritious, but also that people will actually eat. K-12 school lunch programs face this problem too: Kids won't eat healthy food.
But yes, even when I was in college 30 years ago, some students figured out that paying cash at the cafeteria was cheaper than the meal plan, and they raised a stink about it.
Making nutritious food that tastes good on a budget just requires compromise. Fatty meats are cheap and tasty, but they're not great for you. Legumes are cheap and healthy, but most people don't find them very exciting. If you use both, you get something better.
America seems to have gone all in on the the "lean meat" route, which results in many meals which are barely cheap and not good. Of course, my culinary opinion is based on my personal taste preferences. But I mean, like, burritos.
> America seems to have gone all in on the the "lean meat" route
I'm constantly complaining to my family that meat here (in the US... more precisely, the Bay Area) isn't tough enough. They tell me I'm weird, and meat in the US is soft because that's how Americans like it.
(Lest the phrasing confuse people, all of us are Americans.)
Meal plan at my school (Canada, about a decade ago) was 2800$ Canadian for 19 meals a week, for two semesters (checking, it is now about 3600$CAD). Worked out to somewhere in the range of 4 or 5 dollars a meal - what a bagel and a coffee would cost at a cheap chain place.
That being said, I think you did point out something interesting - the pricing and food quality doesnt vary much between different schools in similar situations (markets/locations). In what I've seen, this is because most of these are run by the same big corporate chains - Sodexo or similar.
Don't students in the North America cook at all? In university I used to eat a subsidized lunch, and take care of my breakfast and dinner myself.
Depends - many students live in students residence for their first year in university, and cooking isn't an option there (anything besides a microwave/kettle is not allowed). But most students move to private apartments later, and do most/all of their own cooking.
Interesting, our student residences had fully equipped kitchens. Just larger ones if there were more people sharing the same space.
Some are like that, but most do not have kitchenettes (in my experience!)
meal plans at both schools cost about $11-13 per meal
I knew the chef at a previous employer, he used to like to make bets with people, “I bet you can’t eat £1 worth of food”.
He always won because at catering rates an egg was 2p and a rasher of bacon 1p. The money goes on labour and facilities, the cost of the actual food is a rounding error.
I'm referring specifically to my experiences in southern Germany, by the way.
If memory serves, $11 dollars is roughly twice what a single meal is allowed to cost at a German university cafeteria. This is considerably cheaper than a typical restaurant meal.
Competition or lack thereof
> I also wonder how long the increase in quality in Havelhöhe can last before some beancounter sweeps in and turns the system on its head again based on some pretext. I hope that this never happens, but reality has a way of throwing a wrench into the works every time.
I would not expect much bean counting here besides scientific studies and their results:
The hospital is part of Charite[1] and as such has the status of a research/university hospital and an anthroposophic[2] orientation in which food arguably plays a role beyond what is scientifically proven.
I also have to say that I did spend quite some time in German hospitals and my rule of thumb: The bigger the hospital, the better the food. Never was it as a bad as the regular in-flight meals in cattle class.
You may appreciate this video on Japanese school lunches:
Running a kitchen is real work.
I was riveted by an interview with a 5-star chef that decided to fix public school lunches. She's as much an engineer and accountant and diplomat and project manager as a chef. How she repeatedly figured out how to make healthy, fresh meals that kids loved is testament to humanity ingenuity and can-do attitude.
For instance, to stretch their food budget, they'd buy apples in season and store them in leased fridges.
Sorry, I can't quickly refind the interview. IRCC, it was on Chow food network (?) and the chef moved from NYC to Portland OR.
This is really cool. I wonder how it could be scaled up to make it easier for organizations that can’t get a chef like this to do something similar? His process was pretty custom (parenting with people he knew from his career as an haute cuisine chef and making gourmet food from scratch) that would be difficult to replicate, but if he could systematize this in some way that would be an amazing win for large organizations (dorm cafeterias, hospitals, schools etc). Given what we know about nutrition and the importance of fresh, high quality food and it’s role in all aspects of health, it’s high time that hostpitals (and everyone else) serve better, healthier food.
Concerned about the decrease in meat, and ultimately protein in the diet. His meals only serve meat three times a week? For a surgical patient trying to heal their wounds, a decrease in protein content is the last thing they need.
Perhaps meat three times a week shouldn't be a decrease to start with?
This company makes food for kid's lunches...A similar market...
I agree whole-heartedly. My intuition is that there's a huge opportunity here ready to be replicated by a few creative people with experience in the right spaces.
Not to cheapen the work that Wodni's accomplished, but I imagine a very large part of the reason why this has worked is because a talented, passionate chef has decided to work in a hospital, rather than achieve notoriety and fortune running a high-end restaurant.
The average person choosing to work in institutional kitchen is not one that is looking to make a difference… they're looking to make ends meet.
This is scalable only if they managed to encourage more talented individuals to choose institutional kitchens over commercial ones.
> This is scalable only if they managed to encourage more talented individuals to choose institutional kitchens over commercial ones.
I'm not convinced that this is as difficult as you make out. Commercial kitchens don't usually pay very high salaries, but there is a social status achieved by working for a top-end restaurant. Large-kitchen institutions may not be able to compete on either, but their longevity (compared to restaurants which come and go) allows them to invest in people, taking interested low-skill candidates and bringing them up through a kitchen's roles in a predictable way, including possibly financing culinary degrees for people working their way up.
It's not like Wodni is doing something particularly different (? for lack of a better word) here. Instead of buying from low-quality suppliers whose prices were higher for ensuring consistency at wholesale scale, he bought from a multitude of high-quality suppliers at wholesale market rate. He then, using experience and education, adapted to the differences in inventory that come with working with small-scale suppliers, while ensuring that his budget was efficiently utilized by not wasting anything (e.g. saving fish bones for stock instead of buying fish stock from a supplier). Yes, that requires education and experience to do and do well, but I don't see why more institutions couldn't invest in more people to get that education and experience.
Last time I was in hospital I was dreading the food but it was in fact amazing and came with a pamphlet explaining how they configured each meal specifically for whatever was wrong with each patient. This was my local NHS.