One On One With: How Thomas Cuisine maintains its R-E-A-L Food commitment

Maintaining scratch cooking and quality ingredient usage standards over the past year and a half has been a challenge for onsite dining operators with traditional commitments to such standards. One is Thomas Cuisine, a major foodservice contract management company based in Idaho that operates dining for clients in healthcare, as well as B&I, senior living and other onsite markets, using its R-E-A-L  Food commitment as its standard for scratch-cooked dishes. It deploys a series of its own branded concepts based on that commitment.

Shane Lynch recently rejoined Thomas Cuisine—the company with which he started in the foodservice industry—as vice president of culinary excellence, after a multi-stop career that included stints at onsite dining programs in healthcare and colleges domestically and also in restaurants in the Far East, where the CIA graduate gathered a wealth of experience that has fed its lifelong love of cooking and the culinary arts.

In this One On One interview, Lynch talks about the culinary program at Thomas Cuisine, how the company has maintained its culinary standards and how it plans to address the challenges of the post-pandemic environment.