#kohaof

[vygantek-blog]

Day in the office?

I follow many of my classmates’ internship blogs and admire their posts about amazing and exotic places on earth they are in!

Nevertheless, for this internship I stayed here, in cold little Denmark, so maybe the pictures I will upload will not be as colorful and striking, but this is somewhere I work and learn much :)

So, here you go, that’s the place where the magic happens! Very little, but very organized and clean kitchen, that sometimes has to fit 6 people.

As one of my learning objectives is to calculate the nutrition of the meals offered in KOHAOF, I get to spend a lot of time in this kitchen. And I mean a lot!

In the beginning of my internship I never had an idea how long is it going to take to do it. The food in KOHAOF is really made in “homemade” concept, prepared in huge quantities and by 3 different chefs, therefore, after researching on proper calorie calculation for restaurants (as it needs to be really exact and trustworthy), my supervisor, who is the owner of the place, and I have agreed that the process of calculating has to be repeated 3 times for each meal, dip, dressing, topping, everything! This includes following the cooking process, weighing, calculating, measuring nutrient loss, adjusting timing and cooking methods.

Trust me, this all is so vague when it comes to homemade cooking in huge quantities, and especially when it comes to a plate of soup, which has been taken from a pot ready to fill 30 plates, that are never going to be exactly same in regards of composition and nutrients. Nevertheless, I strive for perfection, or at least the most accurate numbers...

Well, I am not the only one striving for that perfection, I have some good assistance!

Meet Linda, one of the chefs ik KOHAOF. She comes from Ghana and actually has Ghanaian higher education diploma of Nutrition and Health educator. In my opinion, this is really essential for the restaurant, as for instance, the soups are made from so many organic vitamin and antioxidant rich ingredients, which are so fragile when it comes to inappropriate preparation and treatment. Yet this women knows a lot, and does her best to maintain the highest amount of nutrients in the food. However, it is unavoidable, especially when it comes to making food in high quantities and serving it to many people for certain amount of time, which also means reheating once. Anyways, what I am trying to say here, we spend a lot of time together, standing with chronometers and weighs, making it seem like a lab, and trying to achieve consistent, proportional and just in general, best result :D

This is Reza, my internship supervisor and the owner of KOHAOF. Reza is an educated and working engineer, which definitely makes him an accurate and precise person. What is funny, at the same time he is a real kitchen chef, that perceives food as art and does not believe that any meal could ever be repeated or have the exact same composition. Well, that is complicated with the meal nutrient calculation but we are trying to find a balance! :D

Let’s get out of the Kitchen. Here you see the restaurant itself. Which I guess I could partly call my office. When the place is not crowded, I work, research, calculate, create and do my other internship tasks here, as it is close to the kitchen and everything is easily accessible. Nevertheless, it is not always possible and the most comfortable to work in, so many tasks that requires just computer work I can perform wherever I prefer.

So, here you see a fragment of my home office and assistance. I am not going to lie, I have never preferred just sitting at a table stuck to the chair for all day. It is for a reason I study Global Nutrition and Health, which does not support being inactive and stationary all day. And yes, I am actually really productive when I can study or work in a comfortable surroundings.

Post is getting too long, so I will quickly wrap it up with sending wishes from our cold little Denmark, and actually not such cold early spring view from this morning! See you soon!

[vygantek-blog]

The Paradox

As mentioned in one of my blogs, one of my learning objectives in this internship is to learn how such young restaurant business with a concept of health promotion is being managed, what it takes to make such business to settle down, what obstacles it faces and how they are tackled.

So, health promotion and obstacles… KOHAOF has gone a long way and met many stumbling blocks in regards of achieving the dream concept in reality, or is it really achieved yet?

To start with, KOHAOF, Kitchen of Homemade and Outstanding Food, originally was The Kitchen of Healthy and Organic Food. What happened? Well, by the certain rules and laws in Denmark one is not allowed to tell people what is healthy and what is not in the restaurant’s name. Okay, it’s pretty manageable to change it, Homemade and Outstanding sounds great, but what do customers think about it? Just to make a comparison and hear more opinions I have questioned 20 random customers that came into the restaurant to eat. 18 out of 20 respondents agreed that words Healthy and Organic in the name of the restaurant sounds more legit and attractive. Additionally, as the customer segment is mostly interested in healthy nutrition, the restaurant receives many calls with a question whether the food is organic. If it was in the name of the restaurant so many misunderstandings would be prevented. This could lead to a conclusion that such rules and laws restricting the health promotion actually ends up in people making less healthy food choices due to the lack of information.

Furthermore, as mentioned in my blogs, the soups in the restaurant have been designed with assistance of a doctor, which means they assist as a preventive tool for certain target groups and diseases. For example one of the soup, called Kvindens Bedste Ven, Women’s best friend translated from Danish, has ingredients targeting the breast cancer. The soup called Mandends Bedste Ven, Men’s best friend in English, is made of ingredients that work against the prostate cancer. In order to educate and assist the customers to make the most suitable choice for their health, the headlines with such health promotion advice were posted as decorations on the walls in the restaurant. Unfortunately, again, following certain rules in the Danish law, the restaurant had to take it down, as all of a sudden it is not allowed to promote health in such manner.

Here, in my opinion, a major paradox is met… where a chocolate bar filled with refined sugar and all different kinds of additives is advertised in every side of the street, as it gives one an energy rush and helps one not to feel like a “grandmother”, and yet the benefits of an organic and healthful soup cannot have a place of the wall in a private restaurant, as it breaks certain rules of telling people what is a good and healthy choice.

There is more! In the beginning the restaurant was starting only with the healthy vegan soup concept, and again, it was not enough to attract customers… in regards of surviving the restaurant introduced 2 organic burgers, which changed the game. Way more people came to eat, and looking from a bright perspective, way more people has gotten an opportunity to try a healthy soup on the side! However, it is still pretty paradoxical, as many customers shake their heads when the burgers are served with organic and healthy beetroot and sweet potato chips instead of potatoes fried in tons of oil..

It is so accurate that bringing in a new, different, health promoting restaurant concept can be very complicated, as the time it takes for people to adjust and fall in love, can be crucial in regards of budgets. However, it is extremely important to remember the main idea of the concept, and try the best possible ways to maintain it with certain assistance and so called “thinking out of the box”. Don’t you know that Rome wasn’t built in a day!

THANKS FOR YOUR TIME!

[vygantek-blog]

Reflections after my first week

So, today is Sunday and I have finished my first week of my first Internship!

Starting at every work place always requires time to learn, adjust and understand how the things function. Therefore, this week I spent a lot of time following, observing and learning how KOHAOF runs and functions. This introduction time has really helped me to have a better understanding and gave me a base for coming up with new ideas how am I going to fulfill my learning objectives.

Learning Objectives. What and How?

As described in my first blog post, KOHAOF is a newly established restaurant, with a purpose of health promotion. As I thought that my educational background could be really valuable for the restaurant’s success in different aspects, I came up with the internship idea and offered it to the owners myself. After discussing with them and my internship supervisor I came up with 4 different learning objectives that match my background and KOHAOF’s needs. I am going to do many tasks in relation to: nutrition, health, well-being and food habits; health promotion and diseases prevention and pedagogy and health education strategies. But let’s look at it from a closer perspective!

Learning Objective 1.

Learning how to calculate the nutrition of meals that are prepared in high quantities.

This learning objective is closely related to what I have learned in Module 2 (Nutrition, Physiology and Biochemisty) and Module 3 (Quantitative approaches to diet ad disease). In order to perform it I have come up with the key strategies:

Follow the ordering process and choice of the products used in the recipes, make their nutritional evaluation.

Follow the process of preparing the recipes.

Calculate the nutrition of items offered on the menu, evaluate nutrient change regarding preparation process.

These calculations are going to be used on the menu card in the restaurant in order to provide the customers with the nutrition content of the meals.

Learning objective 2

Creating and implementing educational messages while using the knowledge of nutrition, health promotion and disease prevention, and using it as a tool to market the place.

This learning objective relates to module 4,5,6 where I was taught about lifestyle change theories, educational theories, planning and communication. The key strategies for this is:

Create attractive videos, pictures, presentations, texts related to the health benefits of food offered in the restaurant.

Promote these messages on social media of the restaurant.

Learn the tools to achieve the best possible publicity and respondence rate to these messages.

Learning objective 3

Learning how such young restaurant business with a concept of health promotion is being managed, what it takes to make business to settle down, what obstacles it faces and how they are tackled.

Here are the key strategies that I am going to use for this learning objective:

Observe and get to know how everything functions in the restaurant, take notes and give feedback to supervisor and manager.

Follow the tools used to make restaurant successful.

Observe and investigate the health promotion obstacles, research possible ways to tackle it or introduce new.

At the end of the internship, the final report on my observations on what I perceive to be the restaurant’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats and any other areas of improvement, especially in regards of health concept promotion strategies.

 Learning objective 4

Learning how to engage various companies and people in health communication.

The key strategies for this is:

Investigate and research to what certain target groups the healthful food provided at the restaurant could be beneficial to.

Prepare scientifically argued projects about that.

Reach out to certain contact persons, representatives of a target group, present the idea of the benefits of certain food we could offer to the target group.

Create events, social media posts, etc. with them where food in the restaurant could be introduced and promoted.

So, that was just a little introduction about what am I going to do in my internship, what are my main learning objectives f and the key strategies for their fulfillment. What is interesting, that already after a week of participating, learning and observing the companies life, I can see way more perspectives and angles that could be worked on! I am extremely excited for the knowledge and experience I can build on! But now it is time to work on them and come up with the fruits in the following post!

See you next week!