Modern medicine

In order to deliver high-quality, nutritious meals for patients, the kitchens at AZ Zeno hospital in Knokke, Belgium, required Metos to provide the best equipment and solutions.

The kitchen at AZ Zeno hospital in Knokke, Belgium, lives and breathes the ethos of this very modern facility. The meals here are part of a holistic approach in which nutritious food is seen as an essential part of healthcare.

“We want to create a healthy environment, not just for the patients but also for the doctors, nurses and other colleagues working here,” explains Pieter de Smet, kitchen manager. Indeed, the kitchen’s scope is even wider than that. Meals are also made here for local retirement homes and nurseries, and served to visitors in the hospital bistro.
Food is freshly prepared and locally sourced. “I have an excellent staff of dieticians who visit every patient every day to discuss their meals. We try to be as flexible as we can with patients’ wishes; I don’t like to have a set menu card,” explains de Smet.

With such high standards and a wide variety of food being prepared every day, the design for the kitchen had very specific requirements. The chefs needed to be able to create home-cooked meals of excellent quality, all to a semi-industrial scale. Metos won the tender, as the company was well positioned to offer the very best solutions in terms of equipment and design.

“I’ve known Metos for many years; the company is a big player on the Belgian market,” explains de Smet. “They were able to provide the type of equipment we needed for the scale required.”
Ivan Houthaeve, project engineer at Metos Belgium, says: “As we had the complete assignment from A to Z, we had the privilege to be able to adapt the rooms to the machinery. For example, the kitchen building, which is linked to the hospital via an underground connection, was determined in size in accordance with our kitchen design.”
The kitchen formed a firm foundation for the building. “After preliminary discussions with the hospital and kitchen management, we had a concrete final kitchen design of 1,600m², which became the final ground surface of the building. In other words, the volume of the building was a consequence of Metos’s kitchen design.”

Within that design, Metos was able to provide equipment that uses the latest technology so the team can meet their own high standards for every meal served. “The customer wanted a highly efficient, reliable installation. Operational reliability, high efficiency, maximum ergonomics, ease of maintenance and low maintenance costs were the factors that were decisive. Due to the wide range of these top products from Ali Group, it was no problem to offer an answer.”

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