Feeding the Nation

May 9, 2025·43 min·3 clips

Chef Raouf Mansour explains how training staff and making food in-house tripled income and slashed subsidies.

Journalist and host Sheila Dillon visits St. Peter's Hospital to investigate what should be an impossible story: hospital food that is genuinely good. The journey into how this happened is told through Julian Fries, founder of facilities management company Neller Davis, and chef Rauf Mansour. During COVID lockdown, the private catering contractor running St. Peter's food service could not make it pay and returned asking for a 9% increase while still proposing a low-quality high-fryer approach. Rather than agree, the trust decided to bring catering back in-house. Fortunately, an unusual set of COVID circumstances worked in their favor: event catering companies with furloughed staff, including Barley Mitchell, were looking for work, and their skilled chefs helped set a high quality benchmark from the start. Rauf Mansour joined and built a model based on the opposite of standard large-scale catering logic: instead of minimizing ingredient costs and cooking in bulk, he invested in training skilled chefs who could produce restaurant-quality daily dishes — smoked cheddar potato cheesecake with tarragon sauce, North African salmon, fresh salads — at a per-head cost that was actually lower than buying ready-made. The results are striking: staff participation went from 20-30% to nearly 80%, annual income from food went from £500,000 to nearly £2 million, and the subsidy the trust provides dropped from £800,000 to £53,000, with breakeven in sight. Medical students interviewed on site describe coming back daily because the options are healthier and better than outside alternatives. The episode explores whether this model could extend to patient ward food, and the obstacles (the hospital kitchen is too small, patient catering is outsourced nationally), while making the wider argument that feeding the nation well starts with getting the culture and skills right rather than minimizing costs.

As heard by us

A grounded, appetising look at how better public food can move from local farms to school and canteen plates.

Feeding the Nation treats public food as something more alive than a budget line. It opens in Chef Raouf Mansour's bright canteen, where salads, pickles, herbs, smoked cheddar potato cheesecake, salmon, rice, and pickled vegetables make the case before anyone reaches for policy…

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You want to hear how school food, local farms, and public catering fit together.

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