Chair of The University Caterers Organisation (TUCO) Amanda Pettingill welcomed them, saying the event was a moment after a busy academic year to ‘pause, collaborate, and learn from each other before moving on together’.
She said TUCO membership had grown over the past year with 51 new members and the TUCO Academy had trained more than 2,000 staff from member institutions over the past year – free of charge.
Pettingill highlighted conversations with the US-based National Association of College and University Food Services (NACUFS), saying the two groups were looking at where they might work together effectively to benefit the members of each.
She reflected on the change to the TUCO Winter Conference, which had switched from the traditional December date to January following member feedback. As a result, a record number of 152 members had attended in 2025.
The 2026 Winter Conference will be hosted by University College Birmingham on January 13th, while next year’s Summer Conference will be at Edge Hill University in Ormskirk, Lancashire from July 27-29.
In other highlights she announced that her own university, Nottingham was to host a new event later in the year. TUCO Flavours will be a chef-focused training and demo-based chance to help university chefs share ideas and knowledge.
And she said that TUCO was also exploring the idea of a Cooking School to help students. A pilot study is taking place at Manchester University in September to see if the scheme will work and how best to deliver it. The results will then be fed back to members.
Following on from the TUCO update, service champion and TV personality Fred Sirieix spoke about the principles of good service. He emphasised that they were not difficult to follow, but they demanded a clear vision, hard work and good leadership if they were to be made to work.
He said: “We all want the same outcome – happy customers, quality service, and to make a profit. But the money only comes from hard work and discipline. Good service is about delivering every single time and making customers feel special.”
Former policeman Martin Richards now works as a full-time hostage negotiator and he shared with delegates his ideas about how to negotiate. He stressed that negotiating skills were transferable to all walks of life, and were based on managing the stress of the situation – for both sides of any negotiation.
And Katy Moses of KAM delivered findings and analysis from the 2025 edition of The UK’s Largest Hospitality Salary Survey, which interviewed 570 individuals about their pay, work benefits and attitudes to work and their employers.
She said that one of the biggest reasons hospitality staff felt unhappy in their role was because they were under-prepared or not trained properly. The survey highlighted that although 48% of staff said they had enough training, that meant most didn’t and of these 17% said they had received none.
She added that although pay was still by far the biggest factor when people looked at hospitality jobs, younger employees were increasingly also looking for job fulfilment, flexibility, training opportunities and a career structure.
She urged university caterers to look at what individual applicants wanted and to be prepared to provide personalised job packages to recruit and retain the best people.