Food Safety
There are two distinct trends I am seeing in Helathcare across the country. First, there is a need for increased integrity with food safety and thus many operators are slowly using more and more disposable plates and serving dishes. Disposable plates and the like are ‘one time use’ items. They are lightweight. They come in attractive and multisize formats. While they are expensive to use, many operators justify the increased cost by decreasing resources in the dishroom, decreasing maintenance costs in the dishroom, and decrease the need to constantly replace china dishware due to breakage etc.

Disposable plates and the like will be used more and more in health care food services and this trend will be fuelled by not only the need for higher food safety but also the fact that the length of patient stay is decreasing and thus the patient is more likely to accept the disposable plate rather than the china.

Second, the needs of the operator to increase the HACCP program integrity is growing. The Burlodge meal systems for example, have addressed this and now have on-board HACCP monitoring computers that can be monitored and programmed using a central computer. All meal carts can be monitored in real time, allowing the operator full control from a central location. Historical temperature data is also available using the Burlodge HACCP system.