Putting the UCMC kitchen footprint together

With a budget and timeline in place, and the support of the university behind them, the foodservice team at the University of Chicago Medical Center was ready to get rolling with the renovation of one of its patient services kitchens. The facility, which services the hospital’s Center for Care and Discovery and Comer Children’s Hospital, was tripling in size to serve two additional patient floors, to the tune of $9 million. But that didn’t mean immediately jumping in with steel and screws.

“First, we cut out scaled pieces of paper and moved things around,” says Elizabeth Lockwood, project manager. “It was just block outlines of rooms. [UCMC’s foodservice consulting firm] had allocated for this number of trays, this size fridge, etc.” The planning group, including MaryPat Severns—Aramark resident director of food services at UCMC—then discussed the kitchen’s flow on the macro level, moving the tray line from one edge of the kitchen to the center, like the hub of a wheel.

By the time the architects and designer were putting pen to paper, we had fairly concrete drawings that showed where everything would fit,” Lockwood says. The next step: a full-scale mock-up using 2-inch-thick blue foam board, filling the empty kitchen space with what looked like surfaces and appliances designed for a Muppet—but it had a serious purpose.

Related:Getting staff on board for big changes at The University of Chicago Medical Center

UCMC kitchen staffers were invited to simulate meal production, from cooking omelets and toast to assembling trays and running the dish line. It was a revealing exercise—the back grill cook kept bumping into the cold production cook, Severns says, leading designers to add more space to the center of the operation and subtract space from the ends of the tray and assembly lines to reduce steps and increase efficiency.

“There were minimal change orders; we got [the design] right pretty much all the time the first time because we had everybody’s buy-in on it,” says Daryl Wilkerson, the hospital’s vice president of support services.

Because the kitchen was being built with the future in mind, the UCMC team sourced the equipment around the made-to-order style of a modern restaurant menu. Severns says about 85% of meals are made to order (“Not like the old days, where food is sitting in wells waiting to be scooped”), though the ability to cook in bulk for dishes like soups and stews still exists. Combi ovens with convection and microwave capabilities were added, fryers were eliminated and the rack dishwasher was ditched in favor of a flight model. Deliveries also became more efficient, thanks to storage contained to the back of the kitchen—no longer was the dairy cooler on the opposite end from the produce area.

When it came to aesthetics, attractiveness of design wasn’t the first consideration, says Connie Dickson, principal at Rippe Associates, UCMC’s foodservice consulting firm. “Wall, floor and ceiling finishes are part of the architect’s scope; many times, decisions about them are based on budget and code requirements,” she says. “In the equipment realm, we primarily focus on functionality and capacity, but do consider fit and finish when we evaluate options.”

Despite the fact that there were already 50 daily entrees offered on the menu—including popular options like beef pot roast, barbecue grilled chicken breast, beef lasagna and tacos—Severns also wanted to increase the kitchen’s limited-time offerings, a luxury allowed because of its efficiency. “If you have to come back for various treatments often, you want to see those specials,” she says. The efficiency of the new design would mean a 13-minute meal assembly time, down from a previous average of 17 minutes.