Tracy Sutherland, our UK General Manager, spoke with the editor at the Care Home Environment about how SoupedUp is breaking the mould, empowering chefs, and lifting industry standards.
When Belinda Adams founded SoupedUp over a decade ago, she had one goal in mind – to connect catering and care, everywhere.
Working in the hospitality and care sectors, she knew all too well the complexities and pressures on care providers to deliver nutritious, wholesome food on strict budgets.
This, at the same time as meeting residents’ dietary and clinical requirements, enabling preferences, and freedom of choice over meal selection.
Respecting these ideals meant organisations were at odds with competing financial and labour force constraints, something Belinda knew had to change.
This is how SoupedUp was born.
With residents’ wellbeing at the forefront, SoupedUp is unique in its field. The innovative software solution breaks existing performance trade-offs in a way that is feasible, helping social care businesses grow and be sustainable in the future. Here is why.
Combatting the complexity with smart, simple technology
Food is at the heart of every care home. The production, delivery and service of food punctuates a resident’s day, every day, all day.
With 5 food textures, 5 fluid thicknesses, 10 cultural preferences and 100 allergies, dislikes and intolerances, 6 times a day, 365 days a year – 2.19 billion meal combinations annually make care catering complex!
“Enabling care home residents to have choice over what they eat is paramount, but it’s also vital that every mouthful is suited to their dietary, cultural and clinical needs” said Belinda, Founder of SoupedUp.
Traditional paper-based catering systems make it difficult to manage these food requirements and keep on top of changes with government regulations and growing resident numbers, in addition to pressures to curve spending across the care industry.
“Software like SoupedUp allows care professionals to easily make changes and keep records in the one program, simplifying the steps required to meet the multiple demands” Belinda said.
Empowering kitchen staff to raise industry standards
The pressure on chefs to deliver a variety of meals that look and taste great, within budget, has never been greater. While majority of residents still prefer traditional cuisine, it is up to the chef to create diverse menus that cater to IDDSI and other clinical guidelines, allergies, and intolerances.
“Coming up with new recipes and menus that fit all of the requirements can be time consuming. SoupedUp takes away that burden from chefs with things like active resident meal blocking based on meal textures and 15 declarable allergens (Natasha’s Law), giving them time to focus on creating and cooking meals that are exciting but also high quality” Belinda said.
With over 1400+ adaptable recipes with nutritional information and allergen labelling, pre-populated four-week cyclic menus with customisable choices, and pantry list generation, kitchen staff can easily cater to demands at the click of a button.
Enabling quality, without the additional costs Up to 70% of a carers time is spent on food preparation, service, cleaning and documentation, resulting in a costly exercise if done inefficiently.
Next to labour, catering is one of the biggest cost expenditures for care homes. With smart technology, it doesn’t have to be. SoupedUp’s unique catering product, when linked to budgets, enables care home professionals to fully cost recipes and menus and gain a complete understanding of their business.
“High quality food doesn’t have to be expensive. With the right catering software in place, care homes can make huge savings with menu management and planning, dietetic certification, food service delivery and documentation for auditing, resulting in fresh meals… even on a £5 per bed per day budget” Belinda said.
Delivering quality food has many benefits for residents and care home management. The inclusion of fresh, healthy food and improved quality means happier residents, fewer complaints and increased recommendations and positive feedback from families.
A change to traditional care catering models
The savings made from SoupedUp catering technology doesn’t just stop in the kitchen. With an increased demand on compliance and risk management, having documentation and educated staff is now a must.
“Our training software has over 40 training videos from industry professionals, making it a simple, cost effective platform to upskill and onboard your staff” Belinda said.