In a hospital the kitchen is not decided in the kitchen. It is decided by the question of how the meal reaches the patient — and what happens to it along the way.
It is: where does the food have to go, and how does it get there? Is this a central production kitchen supplying other buildings? A finishing kitchen completing what is delivered? Are trays plated and taken to the ward under cloches — or is food served from bowls at the table?
Everything else follows from that answer: the size of production, the number and location of cold rooms, the length of the routes, the staff needed per shift and the time at which cooking has to happen. Planning the kitchen before the distribution route is settled means planning an area, not an operation.
A hospital kitchen is therefore less a room than a link in a logistics chain that runs around the clock and offers no way out. A staff restaurant can have a bad day. A hospital still has to deliver three times on Christmas Eve.
Not the other way round. Only once it is settled where plating and where regeneration happen can the production be shaped.
Trays are assembled patient by patient on the plating belt and taken to the ward under cloche or in a distribution trolley. The advantage is the unambiguous link between diet and person. The price is a tight time window: the belt sets the pace, and everything upstream has to feed it.
Trays are assembled cold and brought up to temperature locally, in the trolley or in the ward kitchen. This decouples production from mealtimes and takes pressure off the kitchen. In exchange, equipment, power and responsibility move onto the ward — and both the building and the staff there have to carry that.
One kitchen produces for further locations, care homes or satellites. This lowers the cost per meal noticeably and shifts the emphasis onto the cold chain, order picking, loading and return logistics. Without dependable logistics a saving quickly turns into a daily problem.
Automated guided vehicles or container conveying systems move food, linen and waste through the building. They relieve staff considerably — but they require routes, lifts, charging and transfer points, and these are among the earliest fixed decisions in a building. They cannot be retrofitted.
In practice these systems are combined: a plating belt for standard catering, bowl service in geriatrics or rehabilitation where people eat together at the table, decentralised regeneration in buildings with long routes. Added to this are pre-portioned methods for pureed and texture-modified diets, which give the food a recognisable shape again.
Each of these decisions is also a structural one. It fixes lifts, routes, docking points, charging stations and parking areas — and all four belong to the things decided at shell stage and settled thereafter.
Staff catering plans for one peak at lunchtime. A hospital plans for three meals on 365 days, plus snacks, late service and catering for staff and visitors. That is not a peak load but a continuous one — and it affects equipment, storage and rosters differently.
The second difference is variety. Alongside the standard diet there are therapeutic and special diets, consistency levels from pureed to texture-modified, cultural and religious requirements and allergen labelling — all patient-specific and all evidenced. This variety costs less in ingredients than in process steps, refrigerated space and time on the plating belt.
If the number of diets is set too low during design, space is missing exactly where the daily time pressure is greatest. Establishing that figure reliably and early is one of the most effective levers there is — and it costs nothing at the design stage.
Hygiene requirements apply in every commercial kitchen. In a hospital they determine the floor plan. Clean and soiled routes must not cross — not for goods, not for staff, not for crockery and not for waste. That is not a question of discipline in operation, it is a question of which doors you build.
Added to this are unbroken temperature control from delivery to the ward, documented traceability, separated areas for sensitive preparation, and requirements for surfaces, joints and cleanability that shape the construction itself.
We plan this as a workflow concept, not as a checklist. A floor plan in which the routes separate cleanly also holds up when the ward is short-staffed. One in which separation depends on behaviour holds up exactly until the first difficult shift.
The driver is not enthusiasm for technology, it is staffing. In hardly any other part of institutional catering are shifts so hard to fill — and at the same time cost pressure is high. Automation in hospitals is therefore no longer a question of whether, but of where it pays.
Most clearly in dishwash technology: return, pre-sorting, loading and unloading are the physically hardest and least easily staffed positions. Automated flight-type machines, sorting aids and return systems have an immediate effect here. The same applies to goods transport, where automated systems take over routes that people would otherwise walk several times a day.
On robotics in production we are more cautious, but open: it pays where the same movement repeats very often. What matters is that the installation can take it on later — floor space, connections, load capacity and interfaces can be provided for without being used immediately. More on this under Cobotics in the commercial kitchen.
The question is often argued as a matter of faith. It is a question of workflow — and in most buildings the answer is a combination.
Cook & chill works where production is time-shifted, where preparation has to run ahead, where surplus production is put to sensible further use, and where a central kitchen supplies other sites or satellites. It decouples production from mealtimes and makes rosters predictable. In return it requires chilled capacity, blast chillers, a dependable cold chain and discipline in documentation.
Cooked fresh remains right wherever the routes are short and the mealtime is fixed — and wherever it is meant to be visible. Freshness is the strongest quality argument a kitchen has, and it works in a hospital just as it does in a restaurant.
Our rule is simple: fresh wherever the workflow allows it — and cook & chill where it is what makes the workflow possible in the first place. What matters is that the installation can do both, because the operating model will change over a service life of twenty years.
A hospital kitchen cannot close. Every refurbishment in an existing building is therefore a logistics project first and a construction project second. Three routes are common — which one fits is almost always decided by available space and by the services.
For all three the critical point is the same: services and space. Both are routinely underestimated and neither can be obtained at short notice. We settle this before the option is chosen, not afterwards — otherwise the site ends up deciding what is possible.
Then comes phasing: which areas can be refurbished in sequence without breaking a workflow? What must the interim operation genuinely deliver, and where may the offer be narrower for a while? Answering these questions early shortens the construction period more than any acceleration on site.
The biggest levers in operation are energy and staff, followed by avoiding food waste. In a hospital the staffing share weighs particularly heavily, because work runs in shifts around the clock and every extra metre walked multiplies with every shift.
That is why almost nothing here pays back as well as a clean floor plan. Short routes, no crossings, storage and refrigeration where they are needed, dishwash and return without a detour. It sounds banal and it is the single largest cost factor across the service life.
The most common mistake in the other direction: a kitchen planned too large. Every additional square metre has to be heated, ventilated, cleaned and served by staff journeys — for decades. Generosity in the wrong place is not a reserve, it is a permanent burden.
The specialist design behind it — every work stage from feasibility study to aftercare.
Mehr erfahrenEight patterns from more than 500 projects — and the point after which they cannot be corrected.
ViewWhere automation genuinely pays in a commercial kitchen today — and where it does not yet.
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