Chef of the Year competition

Annually we hold our ‘Chef of the Year’ competition where our Chefs take on the opportunity to showcase their impressive skills, knowledge, and the high-quality meals that they serve daily to our residents.

The competition enables our chefs to shout about all of the pioneering ways they are able to serve our residents highly nutritional, great tasting, and exceptionally presented meals.

All of the meals that the competing chefs present are created from the same local, high quality, fresh ingredients that they use when preparing meals for our residents.

Applications are open to all chefs across the organisation regardless of level, where they are asked to create and present a 3-course menu including a starter, main and dessert with a budget of £6 per head. One of the courses is to be prepared to IDDSI level 6 standard to demonstrate their skills in this area.

IDDSI stands for International Dysphagia Diet Standardisation Initiative, and is a framework used to determine the texture of modified food and drink for people living with dysphagia (swallowing difficulties). For Chef of the Year, our finalists have to pick one dish from their three course menu to produce at an IDDSI Level 6 texture (pureed).

Announcing our 2025 Chef of the Year winner 

Congratulations to Shaun West of Kingfisher Court, who was announced our Chef of the Year winner for 2025.

The 4 finalists for 2025 were:

• Gwynfor Richards - Kerria Court
• James Conroy- Eric Morecambe House
• Melissa Marshall – Hatfield House
• Shaun West - Kingfisher Court

The competition consists of 3 rounds where only 1 successful chef can claim the respected title ‘Chef of the Year’.
 

1st round

Menus were judged by our service improvement team on: 

• presentation and visual appeal 
• resident involvement in menu selection
• nutritional value of meal for our residents
• skill and ability demonstrated
   

Semi Final

The semi-finalists were judged on:

• The colleague vote
• Nutritional value of the menu
• Their application form

The four chefs with the highest scores went through to our live cook-off at The School of Artisan Food near Worksop in North Nottinghamshire on 3 July 2025.

Grand Final

On Thursday 3 July the 4 finalists competed in a live cook-off at The School of Artisan Food. Among the judges were Anchor’s Director of Care Quality Cath Holmes, and Managing Director of Efoods Steve McFall. 

The judges took into consideration the nutritional value of the meals, use of sustainable/home grown/local ingredients, food waste and how residents have been involved.