Cygnet Health Care Introduces Innovative Catering Tool for Healthier Meals
Cygnet Health Care has partnered with Brakes to launch Nutritics, a cutting-edge catering tool designed to assist chefs in creating well-balanced meals. With the collaboration of Brakes, Cygnet Health Care is implementing this groundbreaking tool to empower its chefs in customizing and developing personalized, nutritionally balanced recipes that provide allergen and nutritional information, enhancing the dining experience for individuals at Cygnet Health Care’s 150 locations.
Cygnet Health Care is a prominent care provider offering support to individuals with learning disabilities, autism, and mental health concerns throughout the UK. To ensure the successful deployment of this initiative across all facilities, Cygnet’s chefs have collaborated closely with Brakes, formulating over 120 recipes using the Nutritics system.
By integrating directly with the Brakes product range, Nutritics allows chefs to incorporate existing dishes and develop new ones. Featuring an intuitive drag-and-drop interface, Nutritics enables chefs to include any desired ingredient, highlighting allergens like wheat and displaying essential nutritional values such as fat, protein, and salt content. The platform empowers chefs to substitute ingredients post-recipe creation to enhance healthiness or adapt a dish to meet halal requirements. Once recipes are created, chefs can share them with their peers at Cygnet Health Care.
The tool also includes budgeting capabilities, enabling chefs to precisely calculate the cost of their dishes down to the per-person expense. This equips Cygnet Health Care chefs to efficiently manage budgets, offering opportunities to exchange higher-priced ingredients with more cost-effective alternatives.
Chef Titilayo Jackson commended the tool for its allergen details and comprehensive nutritional analysis, emphasizing how it ensures recipe accuracy and consistency. Jackson, a chef at Cygnet Churchill, a men’s inpatient mental health facility, expressed enthusiasm over the ability to easily adjust ingredients or measurements in recipes that can then be standardized across all Cygnet locations, fostering recipe sharing and knowledge exchange among chefs.
Raf Hamaizia, Expert by Experience Lead at Cygnet Health Care, highlighted how the tool allows staff to address dietary needs effectively and safely tailored to individual service user requirements. He noted that the feature he appreciated most, from a user experience perspective, is the recipe sharing capability, presenting avenues for best practice exchange among different sites. Cygnet Health Care is currently testing the Nutritics tool in various health and social care settings and aims to extend its use to all Brakes-supported Cygnet Health Care sites later in 2022.
With a focus on delivering exceptional mental health services to local authorities and the NHS for over 30 years, Cygnet Health Care offers industry-leading services catering to individuals with acute and complex mental health needs nationwide. Renowned for its superior mental health care services across the UK, the company remains committed to achieving the best outcomes for service users. 85% of Cygnet Health Care’s locations are rated as outstanding or good, surpassing the national average.
