Nurturing contract food services cook–The fundamental competencies assessment of HACCP certifi ed school lunch contractor

Abstract

Numerous working parents free up time by outsourcing their children's lunch meals.How can the nutritional quality and safety of the food be guaranteed? Our objective in this paper is to propose assessment criteria by deep interview and the analytic hierarchy process(AHP) of HACCP certifi ed contract food services cook to ensure the school lunch servicequality.

First, we collected and extracted indicators of cook competency from the literature. Second, the deep interview technique was used to refine and identify the final indicators according to the characteristics of our study. The subjects of the pre testing survey included cooks and production managers of HACCP certified contract food services suppliers, as well as officials from public health bureau and scholars, experts and high level decision maker from contract food services suppliers. Reconfirmation of reliability analysis was performed for the factors of 75 pre-testing survey by SPSS with Cronbach's α <0.65 each factor. According above accurate factors, 409 formal questionnaires was design by AHP method. Then, we performed a survey investigation of three types of stakeholders in 58 public elementary schools in Taipei. The customers such as teachers parents, dietitians; producers such as producer managers, dietitians, hygiene management personnel and cooks; supervisors such as experts, scholars, school nutrition lunch supervising officials participated in the study. Third, 363 available samples in the reclaimed questionnaires were analysis by AHP.

Finally, the results illustrate competencies assessment of HACCP certified contract food services cook can be established quantitatively. Practical implications/value -- This paper proposes an evaluation tablecan be used as a reasonable model for food service operators, cooks themselves with a reference for training planning also the curriculum references for the course of cooks training in colleges and culinary schools. The HACCP certified contract food services contractor could utilizes the evaluation table on the selection of cooks.

Keywords:

• cook
• core competency
• hazard analysis and critical control point (HACCP)
• analytic hierarchy process (AHP)
• school lunch
• contract food services