How would you feel if you were presented with a bowl of pureed food for your dinner?
The very thought of puree food conjures up images of meals that are shapeless, tasteless, nutritionally deficient and visually unpalatable.
And sadly, for many people in hospitals and residents in care facilities around the world, this scenario is all too real.
Fortunately, by using our puree food moulds, this no longer needs to be the case, with various benefits including:
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Improved meal presentation
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Time saving
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Greater meal variety
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Dining with dignity
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Improved nutritional intake
But what are the top cost benefits of using food moulds to create visually appealing pureed meals?
In this week's article, we look more closely at how adopting this method of preparing pureed meals can impact on your bottom line too!
1) Reduced Kitchen Waste
Scenario 1:
Catering staff can often over estimate how much volume (weight) of food they need to put into a blender, based on the number of texture modified meals they need to produce.
Scenario 2:
The volume of food required can also depend on the type of machine being used to puree the food - for example, a Robot Coupe blender requires a minimum quantity of food to be used in order for it to puree the food to the correct consistency.
Results
As a result of either of these scenarios, there is often leftover puree in the blender after meals are served, which typically gets thrown away, resulting in kitchen waste.
When adopting food moulding as a preparation technique, this need never happen again, as you're able to add food thickener, link to Nutrisis in the shop, and fill mould trays with all the surplus food prepared, until there is no leftover food in the blender.
This results in ZERO kitchen waste!!
Kitchen waste can also be caused by making excessive amounts of food when catering bulk quantities of meals.
This is often intentional based on the notion of "better to have more food than not enough" to cater for the meal service.
In this case, with food moulding, you can "use up" any leftover food immediately after the meal service, by filling the mould trays and producing moulded puree meals and helping further minimise kitchen waste.
2) Reduced Meal Costs
Each moulded food component has a standard yield weight, so it's possible to easily and very accurately calculate puree meal costs“ which is particularly beneficial when compared to the current practice of often serving inconsistent quantities of these meals to individuals on a plate.
3) Reduced Food Waste
Research consistently shows that people on texture modified diets have significantly more food waste (lower intake) of texture modified meals.
This isn't surprising given how visually unappealing a pureed meal can look, smell and taste.
There is now growing evidence/research that moulded pureed meals result in higher food intakes and consequently less plate wastage.
4) Reduced Nutritional Supplement Costs
It makes perfect sense that if individuals enjoy greater intakes of moulded puree meals, they have a greater chance of meeting their daily nutritional requirements.
Therefore there will be less need for nutritional supplementation to meet their oral intake shortfall, (due to poor intake), resulting in additional cost savings.
5) Time Savings
The most often used "excuse" for NOT food moulding is that these meals require more time to prepare. But this reason is often based on the incorrect assumption that you have to mould meals daily which is not the case.
Please note that whilst preparing moulded meals does require an initial upfront time investment, the secret is to prepare them in bulk, in order to achieve significant future time savings by reducing time being wasted daily by cooks pureeing and cleaning blenders at least 3 times for lunch (meat and two different vegetables) and 3 times for dinner.
If you're interested in learning more about our food moulds and food thickener, head over to our website here, link to food moulds and who not grab a copy of our Dignified Dining Guide to learn more ways to improve nutrition for people living with dementia.
