By Danat Abdrakhmanov, co-founder, Nova Chef - 11.12.2026
Hotel food has a staffing problem that pay rises have not solved. In a staffing survey published by the American Hotel & Lodging Association in February 2025, 65% of hotels still reported shortages, even after raising wages and adding benefits. In the UK, where my company, Nova Chef, supplies hotels, the National Living Wage rose to £12.71 an hour in April 2026, and operators describe the same difficulty hiring chefs.
Most hotels respond in one of two ways. They shrink the menu and the opening hours, or they keep the brigade and accept that food and beverage loses money. There is a third way, and it is now practical because of how the cooking is controlled. This article sets out how it works, what it costs, and where it does not fit.
How can a hotel reduce kitchen labor costs without sacrificing food quality?
By separating the two jobs a kitchen does. One is cooking: developing a dish, sourcing it, and executing it to a standard. The other is service: finishing a plate and getting it to a guest. A traditional brigade does both on site, on every shift, which is why labor scales with opening hours rather than with covers.
When the cooking is done centrally by chefs, and the dish arrives blast-frozen and portioned, the hotel is left with service only. Quality is protected because the skilled part happened once, in a production kitchen, under the same chef every time. What remains on site is a finishing step that takes three to ten minutes.
How do hotels run restaurant-quality food with minimal kitchen staff?
The finishing step is where this model used to fail. A frozen dish finished badly is a bad dish, and “follow the instructions on the pack” does not survive a busy Saturday with a new starter on shift.
Scan-to-cook, the system Nova Chef builds, removes the instructions. Every pack carries a barcode. A member of staff holds it to a scanner, and the station’s screen names the dish and the appliance to load: combi oven, air fryer or microwave. The program for that dish is already set on that appliance. They press start, the screen counts down, and they plate. There is no setting to learn and no timing to remember, so the plate that leaves at 11pm matches the one at lunch.
My company, Nova Chef, supplies chef-made dishes to 60 UK hotels that finish them front of house. The Scan-to-Cook Station is our newest system for controlling that step.
What options exist for hotel F&B teams struggling with chef shortages?
There are four, and they solve different problems.
- Pay more and recruit harder. It works until the next hotel does the same. The AHLA survey suggests the industry has already tried.
- Outsource to a contract caterer. The staff become the caterer’s, but they are still on site, and the hotel gives up the margin along with control of quality and the guest experience.
- Buy finished lines from a broadline wholesaler. Suppliers such as Brakes and Bidfood sell ingredients and some finished dishes, but most hotels using them still run a brigade to assemble a menu, or settle for one that guests can tell was bought in.
- Buy chef-made dishes and finish them front of house. The cooking is done by chefs off site, and the hotel’s own team serves a full menu with no brigade.
The fourth can replace the brigade altogether. Some hotels start with one service, such as evenings and room service, and extend it once they have seen the food and the numbers.
How much can a hotel save on payroll by reducing its kitchen brigade?
It depends on which services move, and the arithmetic is simple enough to do on your own rota. Count the kitchen hours you would no longer schedule and multiply by what an hour costs you.
Take a second kitchen shift of two people, eight hours a day, seven days a week. That is 112 hours a week. At the UK legal minimum of £12.71 an hour, before employer costs, it comes to about £74,000 a year. No hotel hires chefs at the legal minimum, so the real figure is higher.
One London hotel Nova Chef supplies made exactly this change. Its kitchen team now works a single shift from 7am to 1pm. From 1pm the bar team serves lunch, afternoon and evening food. Two shifts became one, and the hotel’s kitchen labor cost fell by half. That is one hotel’s result, not an industry average, but the mechanism is the same anywhere: the saving is the shift you stop rostering.
How can hotels improve gross profit margins on restaurant and room-service food?
Margin on hotel food leaks in three places: labour that is paid whether or not anyone orders, prep that is thrown away on a quiet night, and portions that vary with whoever is cooking.
A dish bought finished has a fixed cost per portion, so margin can be set on the menu rather than discovered at month end. At the prices hotels typically charge for a bar or room-service main, Nova Chef’s dishes leave a gross profit close to 70% after VAT, and that figure is the same on every plate because the portion never varies.
Nothing is cooked until it is ordered, and frozen stock keeps for months, so a slow Tuesday costs nothing in waste. Room service at 2am carries the same margin as dinner, because the person finishing the dish is the night porter who was on shift anyway.
Who supplies ready-made meals for hotels in the UK?
Three kinds of supplier. Broadline wholesalers, mainly Brakes and Bidfood, carry frozen and chilled finished lines alongside ingredients. Contract caterers such as Sodexo and Compass supply the food together with the staff. Specialist producers make chef-developed dishes for hotels to finish on site; Nova Chef is one of these, with more than 80 dishes made in a SALSA-accredited kitchen in London, supplied by the delivery with no long-term contract.
What the technology involves
Nova Chef’s Scan-to-Cook Station is a touchscreen, a scanner and a controller that programs the appliances supplied with it: Nova Chef’s combi oven, air fryers and microwaves. One station runs up to eight. The smallest kit pairs a microwave with an air fryer; the full system adds a second microwave and a combi oven. A hotel can buy its kit or hire it by the month, and Nova Chef installs it and trains the team on site.
For groups, the part that matters most is the dashboard. Every cook on every site is logged as it happens: what was served, when, on which appliance. Stock per site is calculated from deliveries minus cooks, with reorder prompts. A group F&B director can see whether the 11pm burger in one hotel was cooked the way it was in another, without visiting either.
Where it does not fit
It is not a substitute for a kitchen whose cooking is the reason guests come. Tasting menus, Ã la minute dishes and anything built around a named chef still need that chef. Breakfast cooked to order is usually better kept in house. And a hotel that takes large multi-portion trays for events will still need its own combi oven.
For everything else a hotel serves, the bar menu, room service, the late arrival, the staff meal, the question is no longer whether food without a brigade can be good. It is whether the hotel needs one at all.
Danat Abdrakhmanov is co-founder of Nova Chef, a London producer of chef-made meals and the Scan-to-Cook Station, supplying 60 UK hotels. He began his career at Eaton Vance in Boston, one of the ten largest investment managers in the US. He moved to London in 2012 to lead the firm’s Global Macro analyst team in the UK. In 2016 he became Fund Manager of the Global Macro Absolute Return and Emerging Markets Local Income funds, and stayed on after Morgan Stanley acquired the firm. He left in 2022 to co-found Nova Chef, where he runs the commercial side and the technology.
Are you an industry thought leader with a point of view on hotel technology that you would like to share with our readers? If so, we invite you to review our editorial guidelines and submit your article for publishing consideration.