Delivered Ready Prepared Meals Framework – Quality Products and Services

At NHS Supply Chain: Food, we are committed to delivering expert food and beverage procurement services to elevate patient, staff, and visitor experiences across all our partnered trusts. We recognise that excellence in procurement involves a multifaceted approach that prioritises safety, value, resilience and much more.

In this article, we explore our Delivered Ready Prepared Meals Framework, that emphasises our responsibility to ensure quality products and services to both our suppliers and trusts.

See our Useful Links section for more details on Delivered Ready Prepared Meals Framework.

Securing best price and value for money is a crucial part of our procurement strategy and practices, however as a framework provider we don’t just limit ourselves to price as the only source of delivering best value for our partners. Through working closely with our supplier base, we can offer alternatives savings routes outside of just “price down” exercises. Food waste is not only a key focus of the NHS but also in wider society, so by working in partnership with our supplier base we are able to offer trusts expertise on how to reduce food waste. This not only provides the trust with a cost saving through reduced food wastage, but it also supports them with meeting their green plan objectives. 

Alongside work on food waste reduction, another sustainability-based procurement practice we can support with is reducing the carbon footprint of trusts menu’s. Similar to food waste reduction not only does this generate a cost saving for trusts it also helps reduce their carbon footprints.

Quality and product diversity is a core part of our procurement practices and strategy. We work closely with our supplier base to encourage innovation to ensure product ranges are keeping up with ever changing trends and preferences in the food market. As part of this focus on continuous improvement, product quality assurance is a non-negotiable part of what we do. To enable this continuous drive towards improving product quality and nutritional specification alignment, product sampling is always an important part of all procurement exercises which we undertake under our framework.

Our procurement teams at NHS Supply Chain: Food adopt a holistic approach that considers value, quality, and safety to ensure a resilient supply chain that you can have confidence in. If you would like to find out more about our procurement processes, please contact your Food Account Manager