Getting the Food Out
Steven Marshall, FCSI, is president of Marshall Associates Inc., a food service consultant firm specializing in the programming and design of correctional food service and laundry facilities. For more than 40 years, the firm has conducted studies of and designed kitchens for state prisons, federal correctional institutions, county jails, juvenile halls, and halls of justice throughout the Western states including six in Arizona. Clients includes the California Youth Authority; Maricopa County, Ariz.; the Santa Clara, Calif., County Jail; and the Montana State Hospital and Correctional Cook-Chill kitchen. In this interview, Mr. Marshall outlines the cost effectiveness and control inherent in cook-chill versus cook-serve delivery methods. He also discusses Maricopa County Jail’s innovative system for acquiring food while keeping down the cost of inmate meals. |
Hava Leisner: Is most of your design work remodels and additions, or are you more often called in to work on a new facility?
Steven Marshall: We do more new work. Probably at least two-thirds of all our projects are new prisons or new jails.
HL: Would you call yourself more of a kitchen designer or a food service consultant?
SM: We are food service consultants but we design kitchens. Before we design them, we very often develop, with the client, what the program is going to be; How big is it going to be? How many inmates or juveniles is it going to serve? What kind of service should it be?
We very often develop a master plan or a study to look at their existing system and advise clients on what would be appropriate for their new facility. And then, ultimately, do the design.
HL: What would corrections officials be looking for when screening an outside food service provider or consultant?
SM: They are looking for experience. If they already have a system in mind or have seen a system they like installed elsewhere, then they would most likely want to hire someone who has done that work or at least done similar work.
HL: You have been with this company for 38 years. Tell me some of the changes you have seen in the design of correctional food service facilities, and the planning of those facilities.
SM: Well, surprisingly, there is very little change. A lot of people, specifically the larger management companies, are just coming around to cook-chill. They have avoided it for many years and they stick to the old tried-and-true system-cooking meals three times a day. You either dish it up on a serving line or you put it in stacking, insulated trays and transport it to the housing unit where inmates are dining. It is very basic, sort of the lowest common denominator of food service employee training. Three meals a day, seven days a week. Here are our basic menus. And you can hire and train anybody to fit in that slot.
With cook-chill you need a higher level of management, an experienced employee who can train the cooks to essentially start over and rethink their concept of how food service is done. Instead of pulling together all the starch and vegetables and protein for three meals a day, and instead of washing and cleaning pots and pans three times a day, the cook-chill method has you basically cooking for inventory. Sometimes the cooking may not be used for another week and you can cook multiple batches in the same kettle without having to clean the kettle and start over again. It is way more efficient.
If you go into most cook-chill kitchens you will notice a serious lack of stress. They are not cooking to deadline anymore. Where as, in a standard cook-serve prison kitchen, they are cooking to either get that food on a serving line or on a cart and transport it to the housing units under crisis mode three times a day.
HL: Is that pretty much the two situations you’ve encountered: cook-serve and cook-chill?
SM: Yes. The alternative is to essentially buy all frozen food from an outside source and reheat it, making you more of a distribution center. You receive finished, produced, frozen food and you re-thermalize it, typically in a convection oven, and then serve it.
HL: Have any of these methods been proven the most cost-effective way to go?
SM: I think cook-chill by far is the most cost-effective method because you only need your cooks five days a week, you don’t need them seven days a week. They produce food for all seven days, all three meals, 21 meals in five days. Just one shift five days a week because the equipment is much larger, rather than going with two shifts seven days a week. There is just a huge savings.
HL: The equipment is actually different if you are going to do cook-chill?
SM: It is the same stuff-it’s just larger.
HL: So, in other words, you would not be putting in that larger equipment if the plan was to cook-serve?
SM: No. The cooking would be too hard to handle with that larger equipment. You need to pump the food out of kettles, you need rolling-rack ovens. And, if you end up with all that hot food at once, it’s just too hard to handle. Typically, what they do is put the food in holding cabinets, so with a cook-serve system the food always ends up in some kind of a holding oven or a portable holding cabinet for hours.
HL: What type of equipment do you normally recommend?
SM: We always try to recommend multiple brands to encourage competitive bidding. One company gets the whole job but multiple companies bid. Multiple equipment dealers bid the job and then, in an effort to get to the best price on the best quality, each of those dealers get quotes from multiple manufacturers.
HL: That is something your company would recommend?
SM: Absolutely. There are a lot of people who like to sole-source equipment. The problem with sole sourcing is that you’re going to pay top dollar for equipment because there is no competition. And they typically know they are sole sourced, so the price goes up.
HL: Do you see great differences when working with a local jail versus a higher-security prison?
SM: Local jails usually have smaller, tighter budgets. They are more mean-and-lean-a little more creative-than a state or a federal facility. Usually, one cook runs the whole place. Although, there are plenty of huge, local county jails with three-, four-, or five-thousand inmates where they are using cook-chill systems and refrigerated transport with reasonably sophisticated re-therm methods. It’s much like the airline model, if you will.
Most of the federal prisons are not cook-chill, they have blast chillers for food safety, but they typically are cook-serve and they serve a majority of their food in big cafeteria serving lines in large dining rooms, with the exception of high-security inmates whose food is served in their housing unit.
A lot of state prisons are on cook-chill systems, but they still transport food in bulk and dish it up on satellite serving lines in housing units and dining rooms. They transport it in refrigerated trucks to multiple housing units at one site and then they re-therm the cold food in bulk and still use a standard serving line. The philosophy being that, long-term inmates would resist pre-plated foods, i.e. a hospital tray, an airline tray, or any kind of packaged food considered more suitable for county inmates serving shorter sentences. Long-term inmates who are going to be in prison for 20 years or more need some sense of normality, such as a cafeteria line where food is dished out in front of them.
HL: So, facilities can utilize a cafeteria line with either food preparation method?
SM: Right. When you have four-, five-, or six-thousand inmates in a facility, you can’t bring them all to a dining room. What you have to do is bring the food to them and once you bring the food to them, transporting it hot to multiple dining areas is logistically difficult, if not unsafe.
To get all the food cooked, panned, and put in carts takes hours and hours, and then it takes another hour or two to transport it to all the housing units. Then by the time the inmates come, a dining room usually is turned over two to four times. If the room seats 100, then 200 or 400 inmates might be served in multiple shifts, so the cafeteria can turn over 12 times a day, four times for each meal. Needless to say, if you are holding the food hot, by the time you are on the third or fourth seating, the food can be a mess. It is dry and old.
So, the best way to handle it is to chill it down after you prepare it, transport it cold anytime, day or night. Transporting it does not mean you have to serve it, you are going to hold it cold at the dining room serving site and then reheat it when you need it. If there is any kind of a count problem or lunch or dinner has to be held up, you have food that hasn’t yet been re-thermed and is not in any danger of getting dry or turning bad.
HL: In that scenario, do you typically have one large kitchen with many heating spots throughout the pods or housing units?
SM: Yes. It saves a ton of labor because of the cooking method. Again, you are only cooking five days a week but producing meals for seven days. You are adding transport drivers but, in re-therm kitchens, those typically are run by inmates and one correctional person, and sometimes one food service person. You have control of time.
The cook-chill method is actually fairly old. We did our first cook-chill system back in the mid-1970s. Facilities are slow to come around because they were staffed by a lot of old cooks and old managers who just could not grasp the concept of chilling beans down and re-heating them. It sounded like leftover food.
HL: Can you tell me about what’s happening at the Maricopa County, Ariz., jail?
SM: Frank Russo was the food and beverage director there-he has since retired-and he developed this fabulous system; I have never seen anything like it. It took him about twenty years, but ultimately he had every food bank in the state of Arizona and every homeless shelter calling him with overages of food. Food they couldn’t use, day-old, two-day-old food. And very often it would be stuff they couldn’t handle. So Frank developed this system where he had about 10 semi trucks and he sent them all over the state and would pick up whole crops of tomatoes. He would average one million pounds of food donated per month, free, to the county jail system. But it was all field food. Tomatoes that had a one- or two-day shelf life, so he would have them cooked or stewed and store them in 50-gallon drums.
If these kinds of things were donated to local food bank agencies, he would pick the food up, he would handle it all, package it and give them 50 percent back in exchange for him getting 50 percent. They would have five truckloads of fresh chicken breast that had been mislabeled and therefore rejected by the supermarket chain. The broker would call him and he would offer them just the cost of their transportation and they would ultimately go ahead and give him five truckloads of free chicken breast. But to deal with that you have to handle them. You have to cook them all, chill them, and hold them. He would get pallets and pallets and pallets of fruit juices that were slightly out of date. Just tons of stuff that couldn’t be sold, but was still healthy and safe food. It was a brilliant system.
He was down to 31 cents per inmate per day in cost of food and his goal was to get to zero. It was all healthy, fresh food-it was just all free food. Someone would call him and give him 50 hogs, and he would have the University of Arizona slaughter them.
Ultimately [the Maricopa County jail system] was projecting about 25,000 to 30,000 meals a day. It’s all chilled, will be all pre-plated, all transported cold, and all re-thermed individually at every one of the housing units.
Their new central commissary will have its own dehydration plant and its own giant cook-chill system, its own canning system.
HL: Do you think the food cost is lower at a state or at a federal correctional institution?
SM: Prices typically are equal.
HL: So, more inmates doesn’t necessarily mean lower costs?
SM: No. More inmates just means more logistics and more serving outlets.
HL: Where do you see correctional food service headed in the future?
SM: I think it’s headed in the direction we’ve been talking about. A majority of facilities eventually will adopt some form of the cook-chill system. The first reason is for food safety, the second reason is because it saves labor, and third because it is easier to manage cold food than it is hot food.