CAST Alimenti professional training activity behold for 2021 with substantive solutions and stand out as unique culinary facility in Italy

Mr. Vittorio Santoro – COO/Managing Director at CAST Alimenti – provides insights into the educational value of the new “Main Central Didactic Kitchen”

What are the motives that led CAST Alimenti to recently implement such an innovative element? What are the principles underlying this concept?

“Our Main Central Didactic Kitchen has been designed with an original and innovative lay-out, endowed with the most modern and cutting-edge kitchen equipment and technologies, available in the present market place. This was made possible thanks to our partnership with leading companies in terms of research and production of tech-food. The lay-out includes: area for goods receiving and storage of fresh raw materials, areas for washing, sanitizing and preparation of vegetables, meat and fish, area of cooking for mass productions, including of course, the need for blast chilling and freezing and storage, area for the preparation of meals for special diets, areas for cooking, ensemble and finishing.

The concept underlying the project is the collaboration with strategic companies: an intrinsic-value philosophy that allowed a new, significant synergy between our school and those companies that are, with good reasons, considered the Italian excellence in their segments. This is one of the guiding principles of CAST philosophy. Once again, we managed to put into practice our way of thinking and applying i.e., to make our School an academic reference point for our students as well as to grant them a highly educational “hands-on” experience, as if they were really for working in the industry, being involved into service situations at top level properties and engaging with the most advanced technologies.

Our Main Central Didactic Kitchen was indeed designed and constructed to grapple the students with different types of restaurant service: fine dining, express cuisine, cuisine for large numbers, production of meals for special diets, savoury breakfasts in front cooking set-up, lunch buffet in live stations and so on. This diversification of activities has led us to design the lay-out and therefore create a very versatile unique environment, featuring modular and exclusive solutions. The educational style based on practical experience, promoted by us as “Made in CAST”, finds here its full expression: the students learn to work and compare with each other and with the “customer” that they have to satisfy.

I proudly state that our main Central Didactic Kitchen project is unmatched in Italy. For the CAST Alimenti this has been a significant investment that we were considering for a long time because it reaches to match above and beyond our new logistics and infrastructure moreover it opens innovative opportunities in the dynamics of the educational/vocational activities.

In our Main Central Didactic Kitchen, our focus is on the student who is guided by the professional Masters and has the unique opportunity to live the experience of operating as a real kitchen brigade, immersed in a dynamism working context which is very similar to the kitchen of a restaurant, prepared to take up a lead as front man for the production of services.”

How does the Main Central Didactic Kitchen project merge with the overall educational offer by the CAST Alimenti?

“The operative aspect of our innovative Main Central Didactic Kitchen is deeply synergic to the whole course structure and educational offer.

Launching the Main Central Didactic Kitchen project also represents our core educational values of CAST with its roots in the culinary arts. We are aware that the food and catering market in particular is continuously evolving, it keeps on moving and challenging; but that’s exactly the same pattern followed by the professional training of CAST Alimenti, which is in continuous transformation and must be shaped according to needs and events of the time.

Just consider what has happened in the last few months with the Covid-19 pandemic. We are left with the awareness of the several changes it brought to the consumer eating habits, generating new consumption attitudes in people and customers that, partly, are going to remain and therefore will require a new positive management, in order to create novel opportunities out of these unpredicted situations.

These years achievements of CAST Alimenti were possible thanks to this positive philosophy and attitude: changes were constant, sometimes slow, other times, as in this particular moment, they required sudden and fast reactions. The main thing is to maintain the focus with a flexible open mind and know-how to quickly respond to the new needs of the market. Reactions need wisdom with a high percentage of pragmatism. Our new Main Central Didactic Kitchen represents this innovative spirit and even more!”