Studacker Retirement Home

The well-equipped Studacker kitchens provide outstanding barbecue and catering services for events both big and small, whether at the Studacker retirement home itself or further afield. Chef de cuisine Hansruedi Wälchli has even won the title of World Barbecue Champion on more than one occasion!

"We serve three meals a day – including a set menu at lunchtime with a choice of dishes – and we normally cater for around 130 residents. That means we need a reliable and hygienic method of disposing of any food waste. We used to simply collect the food waste in small bins in the kitchen and then empty them into bigger bins."

The new WasteStar CC food waste disposal system is impressively compact, but it can handle the food waste from up to 900 meals a day. And if any cutlery accidentally gets mixed up with the waste when staff are clearing plates, then it simply sticks to the surface of the disposal point thanks to the magnetic field. The system's powerful grinding mechanism can even cope with bones, mussel shells and crustacean exoskeletons.

Hygiene is always a key issue when it comes to properly collecting and disposing of food waste, and in a retirement home it's absolutely essential. Yet catering managers also have to weigh up the costs and benefits of every new piece of equipment they buy.

“Thanks to the WasteStar CC, we no longer have to store food waste in bins and clean them out every day," says Hansruedi Wälchli. "That saves us a huge amount of time. Plus it means we don't need the additional cold storage space for waste bins any more. The crushed-up waste is piped into the collection tank where it forms a biological substrate, and this tank is then emptied by a disposal firm. Once the machine has done its job, it's a simple matter to clean it. Since we started using the WasteStar CC in January 2016, we have seen our waste disposal costs fall by over 25 percent. And we've also made big savings thanks to the low water consumption."