Catering Management

Seachef started with a concept of changing the way various ship owners/principals/managers use to visualize and handle the overall catering management onboard. Traditionally it was the Master or a senior officer who was made responsible in overlooking the catering management onboard which uses to take up much of his time. Poor supply planning resulted in overstocking/understocking of supplies, frequent cash transactions lead to ever increasing demand for CTM and along with additional charges had to be borne for connecting cash onboard and furthermore the risk of having excessive cash onboard led to many other unwarranted risks. The catering staff was poorly trained, had no knowledge of paperwork, menu planning nor were they trained in proper store management, food safety aspect or menu planning. All of these matters lead to a chaos onboard at times wherein the crew morale was at its lowest.

Food plays an important role onboard our vessels or far fledged remote areas where there are limited resources of entertainment available to everyone after a hard day’s work and thus it was of utmost importance that the overall catering management needed a serious rejig. With this thought we ventured into providing our catering management services wherein we brought in simple solutions to ensure that the overall catering management onboard our vessels are improved and at the same time is not a financial burden to the Principals.

Today we have been able to provide:

Trained Catering Crew who are professionally skilled and competent to carry out the day to day job and ensure that they follow good sanitation and housekeeping practice.
All paperwork and accounting has been taken away from our senior officers onboard and are handled by the catering staff onboard with the support of a dedicated team ashore.
Development of strategic alliances with reputed suppliers globally who deals in credit terms thus enabling a complete stop to all cash transactions and furthermore reducing the CTM amount kept onboard.
Dedicated Shore professionals who are continuously engaged in supply planning for the vessel to ensure that the best of the supplies are connected at the most reasonable cost without compromising on the overall quality of the goods.
Unlike the cash purchases wherein vessel could not verify each and every products received at the time of payment, Seachef allows our vessels to vet the goods over a specific period thus to ensure that products received are good and acceptable by onboard staff. Any goods supplied which are rejected on various aspects are swiftly credited back by our suppliers thus ensuring no monetary loss to our crew nor the principal.
All menus planned onboard are strictly vetted by Seachef to ensure that the vessel follows a strict menu frame and furthermore it ensures that the menus have variety and caters to all the nationals onboard.

The consumption reported by our vessels are furthermore analyzed food category wise to ascertain whether the right mix of food is prepared and served to our onboard crew to ensure that the food onboard is healthy, nutritious and in sufficient quantity.
Creation of awareness of hygiene and effective/safe garbage management.
Introduced Food Safety Management System onboard to help the catering staff follow a strict compliance to the procedures to follow while handling, storing and preparing food so that there is no contamination to the food and the final resulted food being served is safe from any chemical/biological threats.
Introduction of FIFO concept and structured stores management practices ensured optimal utilization of goods onboard, reduced wastages and tone down on the excessive stocking of goods onboard.
The performance of the catering staff is assessed on monthly basis and training needs are continuously identified which can then be completed once the catering staff is ashore.
Seachef is accredited with ISO 9001-2008 and follows a detailed process on international norms.
In the process of developing a unique purchase/menu planning software in the maritime industry which will make the paperwork onboard almost negligible.