One Really Good Chef Cooking Excellent Food: Josh Hawker on Centralised Kitchens, and the VAT Problem Nobody Talks About
Josh Hawker was selling Jaguars before COVID sent him into his family's care home company. He ended up in the kitchen, fell in love with it, and never went back. Now Head of Operations at Able Care Homes, he's built a centralised kitchen serving food for up to a thousand residents a day across the South West and South Wales — attracting restaurant-quality chefs by offering them something no restaurant can: Monday to Friday, nine to five, every weekend off. In this episode he talks about consistency, pureed Victoria sponge, and why care homes are paying VAT they should never have to pay.
Josh Hawker's route into care catering involved a global pandemic, a furlough, and a chef who point-blank refused to come to work. He'd been selling Jaguars and Land Rovers when COVID hit and his family's care home company suddenly needed all hands on deck. He came in. The first day, one of the chefs wouldn't enter a care home during a pandemic. Josh stuck his hand up and said he'd cover it — he'd always loved cooking — and never went back to car sales.
What he found when he looked properly at the company was what he suspects is a fairly common problem for family run care groups: a clinical operation that was genuinely excellent, and a catering operation that was left largely to whoever happened to be in each kitchen. Some chefs were exceptional. Some weren't. And there was no consistency across the six homes.
The solution began almost by accident during the pandemic, when staff shortages and PCR test results meant that some kitchens were suddenly empty. Rather than panic, Josh started cooking for two homes out of one kitchen. Then three. By the end of 2022, one kitchen was consistently feeding three of the six homes. By the end of 2024, it was five. And in the middle of 2024, the company bought an office building in Bristol, moved the head office to the first floor, and converted the ground floor — cubicles, printers, wires and all — into a state-of-the-art kitchen capable of producing food for around a thousand residents a day.
Able Care Kitchens is now delivering fresh food across the South West and into South Wales for homes beyond their own six, and Josh's ambition is clear: to be the quality end of a market that has so far lacked one.
The other thing centralisation solved, quietly and significantly, was the care of residents who need modified diets. Able Care Homes specialises in complex dementia — residents who may have dysphagia, who may have lost the ability to use cutlery, whose nutritional needs are both complex and easily overlooked when a single chef is trying to manage seventeen covers and two one-off pureed meals simultaneously. Centrally, Josh's team can batch all ten pureed residents across the hundred together, give them the real attention they deserve, and produce something beautiful. The example he gives is a Victoria sponge for afternoon tea: every other resident gets a slice, and the resident on a level four dysphagia diet gets a pureed Victoria sponge that tastes exactly the same and looks as close to the original as skill allows. Inclusion, not an afterthought. He's also used the complexity of dementia catering as a recruitment pitch — telling chefs from restaurant backgrounds that this is a frontier they haven't cooked on before, and that they can help develop it. It works.
Subscribe wherever you listen — and if you've ever wondered why the chef in your care home keeps leaving, Josh has the answer.
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