This paper discusses how the production principles of Lean Manufacturing (Lean) can be applied in a large‐scale meal production. Lean principles are briefly presented, followed by a field study of how a kitchen at a Danish hospital has implemented Lean in the daily production. In the kitchen, the main purposes of implementing Lean were to rationalise internal procedures and to increase production efficiency following a change from cook‐serve production to cook‐chill, and a reduction in the number of employees. It was also important that product quality and working environment should not be negatively affected by the rationalisation of production procedures. The field study shows that Lean principles can be applied in meal production and can result in increased production efficiency and systematic improvement of product quality without negative effects on the working environment. The results show that Lean can be applied and used to manage the production of meals in the kitchen.
A new phenomenological model is proposed to correlate extrudate expansion and extruder operation parameters in a twin-screw food extrusion cooking process. Buckingham's pi dimensional analysis method is applied to establish the model. Three dimensionless groups, i.e. pump efficiency, water content and temperature, are formed to model the extrusion process from dimensional analysis. The model is evaluated with experimental data for extrusion of whole wheat flour and fish feed. The average deviations of the model correlations are 5.9% and 9% based on experimental data for the whole wheat flour and fish feed extrusion, respectively. An alternative four-coefficient extrudate expansion equation is also suggested for the three dimensionless groups. The average deviations of the alternative equation are respectively 5.8% and 2.5% in correlation with the same set of experimental data.
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