Recipe-driven methods for the design and management of food catering production systems

The food catering industry provides ready-to-eat meals to consumers who eat away from their homes at many heterogeneous points of demand, for example, schools, hospitals, and company canteens. Given the number of consumers served, many diets, tastes, and expectations must be satisfied, and this fact enlarges the variability and complexity of the menus, made from many hundreds of recipes. Such complexity also affects the production process and results in a specific organization of the production system and the associated logistic activities. First, the whole production needs to be organized in agreement with the sequence of processing tasks of the recipes, in a typical job-shop system. Second, the details regarding the raw ingredients, work in progress (WIP), and finished products of each recipe can be used to set the hierarchy of processing tasks and to support production scheduling accordingly. However, the lack of knowledge and data relating to the task sequence beyond the recipes limits the implementation of adequate food catering production processes and control systems. This chapter deals with the organization of production activities in a food catering facility and introduces a methodology for the design of accurate task sequences for each recipe starting from the bill-of-materials of the recipe’s ingredients. The deliverable of the proposed method is the hierarchy of the processing/handling/packing task necessary for each recipe, which could be quickly implemented in a spreadsheet or management software for the scheduling of the production activities. Specifically, an algorithm is defined to provide a graph of the task priority according to precedence constraints, and a data architecture illustrated to store the resulting working cycle. Finally, this chapter discusses the potential application of such methods in the food catering industry in agreement with the expected growth of food service demand and the standardization of production.