Eat Your Food as Medicine: Anwar Kajee on Staff Retention, AI Monitoring, and Running Hospitality Across 50 Care Homes

**Eat Your Food as Medicine: Anwar Kajee on Staff Retention, AI Monitoring, and Running Hospitality Across 50 Care Homes** Anwar Kajee. has spent 30 years in the care sector and 15 of them with Country Courts — watching it grow from 15 homes to 50, each one pushing the standard of environment and food a little higher. In this episode, recorded at a brand-new care home in Somerset on the week it opened, he talks AI infrared monitoring, the retention strategy that keeps chefs past the two-year mark, and why the menu belongs to the residents, not the kitchen. ## SHOW NOTES This episode was recorded in a brand-new care home in Mere, Somerset — opened in January 2026 after an 18-month build, and still finding its feet when Rob Spence sat down with Anwar Kajee, Hospitality Director at Country Courts. The setting felt appropriate. Country Courts has been on a long arc of growth — from 15 to 20 homes when Anwar joined 15 years ago, and every new building represents a further step in the same direction: quality environments that demand quality food to match. Anwar came to the conversation ready to answer James Brown's question from the previous episode — what is the most innovative introduction to food in the care sector in the last two or three years? His answer was immediate: the AI infrared monitoring system Country Courts has installed across its homes. Not a camera. A thermal sensor that watches over residents through the night, detecting movement, monitoring sleep quality, flagging falls in real time. The data feeds to a central platform that staff and families can access. It's already changing how teams respond, and Anwar sees the next step clearly — using the same technology to track nutritional intake, flagging when a resident's eating patterns shift before a clinical problem develops. Food and tech, quietly converging. The conversation turns to staffing, which Anwar approaches with the directness of someone who has spent long enough in the sector to know where the real losses happen. The two-year mark, he says, is the inflection point: get a chef to two years and you're likely to keep them. The challenge is the first six months — a period of high risk where the wrong induction, the wrong culture, or simply the wrong sense of being seen can send someone back out the door. Country Courts surveys every new employee at six, twelve, and eighteen months. Not as a tick-box exercise, but as a listening mechanism. The induction itself, Anwar is emphatic, must be exceptional: welcoming, clear, and designed to make someone feel they've arrived somewhere worth staying. Chef ownership helps too — at Country Courts, chefs hold their own budget through a declining balance system, negotiating directly with suppliers, building a stake in the outcomes they're managing. That ownership extends to the menu. Resident consultation isn't a formality here — it's the starting point. Menus are built around what residents actually want to eat, reflect a multicultural population whose tastes don't fit a shepherd's pie default, and are plated in the kitchen rather than served from a trolley. The direction of travel is high-end: Anwar wants his homes to feel like quality hotels, and the food to carry that same signal. He quotes Steve Jobs — *"eat your food as medicine, or you'll be eating your medicine as food"* — and means it practically, not as decoration. **Subscribe wherever you listen — and if you're thinking about how food and technology might work together in your setting, this one's a good place to start.** **A massive thank you to our Sponsors:** Unilever Food Solutions allmanhall Powered by Paragon Creative Studios * * * Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.