How Metos keeps Trondheim’s public kitchen running

Trondheim Kommune plays a crucial role in providing food and ensuring the wellbeing of the elderly in one of Norway's largest and most historic cities. Jim Banks discovers why Metos is the preferred supplier for this essential kitchen facility. 

Back in 2002, the city of Trondheim in Norway took the bold decision to centralize the production kitchen for all of the municipality's food production. One large kitchen replaced the many co-located small kitchens in the city’s nursing homes in a bid to increase efficiency. 

Now, this central kitchen facility supplies food to both municipal and private institutions, district cafés, vulnerable or disabled people living at home, schools, after-school care centers, and kindergartens. Operating 365 days a year, producing food from 7 a.m. to 8 p.m., Monday to Friday, then handling packaging and prep from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. on weekends, Trondheim Kommune's kitchen distributes meals every day across the city. It is a lifeline for many of its citizens.

 
“We employ 47 people in the kitchen, working in shifts, including more than 30 chefs,” says the kitchen’s manager Tony Andersen.

“We are expanding, and Trondheim is growing as a city, so there will be more and more elderly people in the future. We are talking about one extra nursing home every two years, with 60 to 100 people in each.” 

With the demand on its services rising, the operation made the decision to update its equipment, which is heavily used for at least 10 hours every day. 

“There is a lot of wear and tear, more than in a hotel or restaurant, so the equipment risked getting worn out, and it was older tech, so we wanted more modern, more effective and more automatic systems,” Andersen explains. “For example, we have pumps that pump food from big 400-liter kettles. They can suck soup, for example, into the pump and dispense into bags, label them, and suck out air to vacuum pack it.” 

“Most of the food is handmade, so we boil the stock for sauces. We process meat with herbs to make our own meatballs and lasagna and so on, so there is a lot of work for chefs to do in-house,” he adds. “We updated the dispensing, storage and food management equipment, as well as installing an automatic frying table that dispenses meat, cooks it on both sides and then moves it along to package it.” 

The kitchen can make up to 16,000 meat patties each day, prepped by hand but cooked automatically. That is just one part of its operation, however, which has many other automated processes, and a heavy demand for warewashing. For such intensive processes, the kitchen turned to its long-term equipment provider – Metos.

Perfect partners 

Metos has been the preferred partner since the kitchen was centralized in 2002, and it has supplied a vast array of equipment – kettles from its newest Proveno Combikettle range, bratt pans, Hot-fill DOS 2 and DOS 3 Food Pumps for the quick and precise dosing of liquid foods, and more. 

“Every four years, we put the contract out to tender, but we have always chosen Metos because their equipment suits our needs,” says Andersen. “They know the kitchen, they know the people, and they know the challenges and opportunities.” 

“We have been talking to each other about products and projects nearly every week since I inherited the contract 18 years ago,” says Espen Melheim, sales manager at Metos in Norway. “This is a large kitchen for us – 3,000 meals per day – and we have installed several kinds of equipment so they can cook both small and big batches. 

It is not only the versatility and reliability of the equipment that has made Metos the preferred choice of supplier. In Norway, sustainability is also very high on the agenda, especially in publicly owned facilities such as Trondheim Kommune. 

“Price is important to clients, but around 30% of the equation is based on sustainability,” explains Liv Haugen, sales executive at Metos. “That is a real change. Our distribution channel is sustainable, including dishwashers that reduce water and chemical consumption. That is partly why Norway is a place of opportunity for us – sustainability aligns with our own standards.

For Trondhiem Kommune, the MyKitchen program run by Metos is another big plus. The service stores all the operation data on the hardware in the kitchen, so that it can be used to schedule servicing, monitor the status of individual pieces of equipment, and plan any downtime that might be required. Managing maintenance allows Andersen and his team to plan ahead, boosting production on other days so that the kitchen can close when necessary. 

For more than 20 years, the partnership has run smoothly, and there is every reason to believe it will continue to flourish in the future.