Delice de France hones in on deskilled kitchens

By Nicholas Robinson

- Last updated on GMT

Bakery giant Delice de France has restructured its bakery manufacturing operation in response to the drain of skills in some hotels and restaurants.

Neville Moon, head of UK innovation for Delice de France, said hotels and restaurants were making their kitchens smaller to cut costs and were losing skilled workers as a result.

“The kitchens are a lot smaller than they used to be in the past and what that means is there is part deskilling, but there’s also a space management issue,” ​he told FoodManufacture.co.uk in this exclusive podcast.

As a result, chefs were calling for more pre-manufactured items such as pastry cases and sheets of bread, which they could add to in the kitchen.

‘Feel like homemade’

“Canapan bread ​[sheets] and tartlet bases are semi-prepared and chefs can add their fresh ingredients and they feel like homemade,” ​said Moon.

The factories where the products are made are like large kitchens, with rows of chefs preparing the products by hand, explained Moon.

“They are not a factory as you know it; there are no hoppers, depositors and laminators or lots of heavy machinery around.

“We barely call the sites factories; it’s more like a large kitchen. But the workers in there are highly skilled.”

To hear more about Delice de France’s response to deskilled kitchen workers, listen to this podcast.     

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