HOPI Chef Tech Center – Where Culinary Work and Innovations Meet

9/26/24 5:45 AM

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The HOPI Chef Tech Center was created with a goal of offering clean and excellent food products to the Czech and European market. “Our core product is broth. Once you have broth you can make soup, and once you have soup, you can make fresh packaged meals”, explains Filip Sajler, the CEO.

What sets Chef Tech apart is the synergy of culinary work and modern, cutting-edge technology. They aim to find innovative solutions while ensuring sustainability – cook delicious and nutritious food and keep it fresh longer using the latest technology. All with minimal impact on the environment.

– We want to have flavor in food and ensure the quality and purity of the product. This is complemented by treatment technologies, which allows packaged meals to have proper shelflife and stay fresh throughout, without the need for any preservatives or additives, Sajler says.

At the core of their kitchen is Scandinavian technology, made up of several machines set in a sequence. It all starts at the base, which they are making using the Mixpan bratt pan. It can produce 100 kg of base without the need for direct supervision.

– Our soups, sauces and ragouts are made in a cooking kettle which stirs, boils and cools down all by itself. We have automated all the hard prep work, saving human resources, continues Martin Stanek, Creative Chef at HOPI Chef Tech Food.

The cooked meals are packaged using two different methods. The first one is Hot Fill, where the hot meal is pumped from the cooking kettle into a bag-packing unit where it is bagged and quickly cooled down using a water vortex. The second method is Cook&Chill, where the meal is cooled down directly in the kettle or in a shocker and then packaged in a modified atmosphere.

– We prepare our meat using a large-scale sous-vide cooker, which basically cooks the meat at low temperatures in a vacuum, and the cooldown happens directly inside the machine as well, Sajler explains.

– But we don’t intend to stop there. We are constantly looking for new processes, technologies and ways to innovate.

That’s why Metos, as one of the largest professional kitchen experts in the field, was chosen into the task.

– This project was kind of different from many others, because there’s two different solutions under one roof, explains Director Gregory Archer from Metos Cooking Solutions.

– The production of the bone broth on one side is very, very high technology with long ambient shelf-life. And the other side of the kitchen, where the Metos Cook&Chill equipment is implemented, is something that the chefs can do in their normal cooking styles, he explains.

– I think everybody has been very pleased with the results, he rejoices.

Metos Cooking Solutions specializes in large production kitchens. The goal is to combine modern, high-quality technology with culinary knowledge and make work easier and more efficient while keeping the food’s quality excellent. Metos Cooking Solutions is a part of the Metos Group.