Introduction and overview

Park Care Meals is a family run business.The meal service originated in 1995 from our care home from which meals were provided to a day centre, then the immediate vicinity this then rapidly spread to cover the whole of Barnsley and separate kitchens were purchased to meet demand.

In 1999 a depot was opened in Sheffield and in 2001 a Doncaster depot was opened to take over the community meals services of the respective cities.

At present we provide approximately 4500 meals a week throughout these areas.

We are members of the National Association of Care Caterers (NACC) and use their Standards as our basic reference. The kitchens are an Approved Food Business Establishment in accordance with Regulation (EC) No. 853/2004 and so obviously have an extensive HACCP plan which can be viewed upon request.

We use a cook chill method of production where all the meals are produced at our Barnsley kitchen, chilled in accordance with food hygiene standards, dispatched in refrigerated vans to the regional depots, stored overnight and regenerated the next day for delivery by our trained uniformed staff. For the main meal we use a 3 compartment foil tray as standard and our portion sizes are on average 30% larger than the specified standards.

We have found that this system is very effective as all meals are hand prepared which means we can tailor each individual meal to the customers needs.

Not only do we take the service users basic dietary requirements but also all dislikes they have so for example if they don’t like a certain meat or vegetable a substitute will be used so they never receive anything they don’t like. This also means that for those with a bigger appetite we can provide a slightly larger meal and conversely those that get over faced with too much food we provide a smaller meal as well as providing meals with the meat content already cut up for those that struggle with utensils.

Each delivery driver wears a uniform and carries an ID badge and delivers the same route each day (apart from holidays and days off) which breeds a familiarity with the service user which in turn makes them feel more comfortable and also means the driver is more likely to realise if the customer is in need of any particular help.

We appreciate customers making a regular order to assist our cooks in their production although you may have the meals as little or as often as you like, for example Every day or Mon, Wed, Fri, Sun