We're Not Dealing with Tins of Beans: Care UK's Andrew Mussett on Dopamine, Fakaway Days, and a Bread and Butter Pudding That Saves Nine and a Half Grand a Year
Andrew Mussett arrived in care catering because his contract in Wales ended and he didn't want to move house. He walked into a care home in the Welsh Valleys as head chef, saw what needed changing, and changed it — and eleven years later he's still at Care UK, now as Hotel Services Manager covering two or three regions across a group of around 260 homes. This is his first ever podcast recording...
Andrew Mussett's path into care wasn't driven by vocation. He was living in Wales, he had a house he liked, and when his contract ended he looked for something local. A care home in the Welsh Valleys needed a head chef. He turned up, saw things that could be better, made them better, and found he couldn't leave. What started as a pragmatic decision became seventeen or eighteen years in the sector, the last eleven with Care UK — the longest he's worked anywhere. His role now spans catering, kitchens, and laundry across two or three regions: supporting home managers through challenges, interviewing head chefs, running audits, implementing new ideas, and delivering training. He describes the work through its problems — \"it's like a big bowl of spaghetti, you tug on one strand and the others tighten up, eventually you find the one that lets everything relax\" — and says plainly why he stays: they're not dealing with tins of beans, they're dealing with human beings. Five residents who all dislike chicken still have five entirely different layers of complexity underneath that.
The nutrition work at Care UK is systematic. Three or four manuals come out each year, each targeting a specific area: blood sugars and diabetes (giving residents with diabetes the same desserts through thoughtful reformulation), hydration, an IDDSI book mapping regular dishes through each adaptation level, retro baking. The frame Andrew uses is fuel quality over fuel quantity: everyone knows roughly how many calories they need, far fewer know how much omega-3 or vitamin D or serotonin precursors they're actually getting. The next project is serotonin and dopamine — genuine mood improvement through food, not ecstatic happiness but a measurable increase in wellbeing and better sleep patterns. He walks through the dopamine exercise: close your eyes, imagine going to buy a bar of chocolate, imagine purchasing it, imagine unwrapping it and eating it. That's the shot. It isn't weakness or comfort eating — it's the body requesting something it needs. The project after that is vitamin D, and Andrew's preference is food over supplements: swapping white mushrooms for brown chestnut mushrooms is one of the simpler changes that adds meaningful vitamin D across a menu.
Subscribe wherever you listen!
A massive thank you to our Sponsors:
Powered by Paragon Creative Studios
","author_name":"Paragon Creative Studios"}