HC-One has celebrated the graduation of its first cohort of group development chefs.

Victoria Meakin, Pete Coles and Suzanne Stirling are celebrating the end of their 10 week training programme, which supports catering colleagues of any level to progress to senior roles with additional leadership, strategy and innovation responsibilities.

Chris Bonner, executive chef and nutrition and hydration lead at HC-One, said: “We are proud to have selected these highly promising chefs from our internal talent pool. Each individual displayed enormous potential within their existing, home-level work, and we are excited to support them to excel in the next stage of their career progression. There are no limits to what you can achieve through a career in social care, and our home-grown experts prove just that.”

The ten-week programme provides one-of-a-kind opportunities for those developing a career in catering in their local care home. The initiative was introduced at the beginning of the year as part of HC-One’s drive to make it as easy as possible for anyone across their 275 homes to access meaningful and rewarding career pathways in care hospitality.

Now that the first cohort of group development chefs have graduated, they will be working with wellbeing and catering teams in homes to deliver truly specialist nutrition and hydration programmes tailored to every resident.

The new team of group development chefs will also work directly with residents in each home, delivering pop-up shops, recipe tasting sessions and cooking activities to co-design and co-deliver their food and drink offer.

To celebrate their graduation, the three hard working chefs will be treated to a trip to London’s Billingsgate Market for a masterclass on fish with celebrity chef CJ Jackson, principal and chief executive of Billingsgate Seafood School.