Cost Factor Food Waste in Swiss Hospitals. A case study on food service processes to develop a food service optimisation tool for facility management

Purpose: The need for more transparency, efficiency and effectiveness in Swiss hospitals puts facility management departments into the position to act. One action might be seen in optimising processes. And one of these processes is the food service process, which ranks second in terms of costs. This process has the characteristic that process waste becomes visible as food waste along the entire process. From a facility management perspective the appearance as well as the amount of food waste in the various process steps give the opportunity to detect optimization potentials. With this the facility management helps the core business to meet the overall targets by optimising their own processes. The object of study is limited to Swiss hospitals. This research creates significant contri-bution to knowledge by developing a prototype assessment tool for process optimisation, based upon the specific example of generating waste during the process of food service. Methodology: For that, a multiple case study is conducted, applying a mixed method embedded qualitative research design. The first step comprises a literature review, providing the theoretical basis for this research work. The following data collection during fieldwork splits into two phases. Fieldwork phase 1 and phase 2 each consists of three sources of data collection. For fieldwork phase 1 they are a) semi-standardised observations with unstandardised interviews for informant verifica-tion, b) focus groups and c) collection of secondary data. For fieldwork phase 2 they are a) semi-standardised observations with unstandardised interviews for informant verification, b) collection of secondary data and c) various measurements of quantification. Validation of the results and findings during the research is realised in a focus group with experts. Data collected is analysed and visual-ised in matrices and by descriptive statistics. Findings: This thesis contains detailed food waste measurements from a facility management per-spective and a comprehensive list of 542 food waste factors along the food service process. The list is compiled considering a literature review, focus groups and observations. In addition to the food waste factors relationships between the different process steps are outlined. They are based on the observations. By combining a lot of these findings a prototype assessment tool is made. Originality/value: The main outcome is the creation of the prototype assessment tool, which is appli-cable on the described process. The developed tool is not only a contribution to knowledge from a scientific research perspective, but also highly valuable for practitioners. Because some of the data were obtained from and fed back into a real business practice environment, the tool is of great value for healthcare organisations. It is capable of reducing food process and cost waste in daily business by detecting the process steps which need optimisation as well as with the help about the possible reasons behind them. The way of the assessment tool development can be applied to other facility management processes. Overall, this research is the very first in this area, focusing on the topic of food waste from a facility management perspective in the hospital environment