Skip to main content

CASE STUDY

HCE provide perfect operation for Ashford and St Peter’s NHS Trust

 

  • Client

    Ashford and St Peter’s NHS Trust

  • Location

    Surrey, UK

  • Industry

    Healthcare

Ashford and St Peter’s Hospital Trust was established in 2010, and since then has been constantly growing to be the largest provider of acute hospital services to residents living in Surrey.

Serving a population of over 410,000 people, the trust employs over 4,000 members of staff. With such growth, Rauff Mansour, Head of Catering, approached HCE to assist in the redesign of two staff canteens to create more space to help keep up with demand.

“At Ashford and St Peter’s Hospitals staff feeding is really important. It provides a space for busy staff to have some downtime and refuel in a healthy and nutritious way. We are the only outlet in the hospital that offers hot food and a space for the staff to socialise. We were serving around five-hundred to six-hundred main courses but the space was only fit for four-hundred.”.

For Rauff, the decision to award the project to HCE was simple:

“After a competitive tender process HCE won the contract to provide a full turn key solution from design to install. We were won over by the way HCE understood our needs and challenges that we face, and the resolutions they created to overcome these.”

Shaun Lawrence, Direct Sales Director at HCE explains further about Rauff’s initial brief.

“The brief from RauFf for front of house at St Peter’s was based around increasing the space available to present their hot, chilled and ambient food offering, and to develop an area for a salad bar. For back of house, Rauff required us to redesign the kitchen in order to provide additional space for pastry, meat and veg prep and storage.”.

Shaun continues:

“We looked at creating separate meat and vegetable preparation areas,whilst increasing storage across the whole kitchen. We installed new shelving, racking as well as developed additional cupboard storage. In the kitchen we replaced much of the previous equipment with new combi ovens and upgraded the extraction and canopies. Overall, we felt that through working with Rauff, we got to the solution that everyone was going to be happy with.”

“HCE are not suppliers, they are partners and I would recommend HCE to any business. They treated the whole operation professionally; they were honest and clear on everything. They made the whole operation smooth for us and understood what we needed.”

Rauff Mansour

Head of Catering at Ashford and St Peter’s Hospital Trust

To ensure that the kitchen and front of house had everything that was required, Rauff made sure that everything would follow a spec that he wanted:

“The kitchen is amazing, and as any chef is,  I am really passionate about the equipment within it; making sure that the space is  fit for us and fit for our needs. For example, we worked across designing the salad bar, HCE understood what I wanted, how I wanted it placed, and this was the same when we were deciding on the hot counter. It is really refreshing to see that HCE understood what I needed.”

The result is without a doubt, a catering operation that looks fantastic and one which works perfectly for the hospital staff. As Rauff explains:

“HCE are not suppliers, they are partners and I would recommend HCE to any business. They treated the whole operation professionally; they were honest and clear on everything. They made the whole operation smooth for us and understood what we needed. They fully delivered, so much so, that we HCE are now our equipment and maintenance specialists across the trust..”

GETTING STARTED

Budget needn’t be a barrier to your perfect kitchen.

We know budget is a big concern when designing a kitchen. That’s why we harness the latest technologies and take extra care to find you the most suitable, economic and practical solutions that bring your vision to life while working within your price range.

Get in touch to discuss your project

Call us on 02380 271 010 to discuss your commercial kitchen project or equipment today